Cameron loses more public trust following #ProjectFear psy-ops

David Cameron’s #projectfear uses a well know psychological technique called loss aversion. Wiki:

In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.^[1] Loss aversion was first demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.^[2]

This leads to risk aversion when people evaluate an outcome comprising similar gains and losses; since people prefer avoiding losses to making gains.

This is why politicians always say in advance they will “run a positive campaign” but then end up running a negative one – fear of downsides outsides potential benefits of upsides in the average person’s mind.

That’s also why entrepreneurs, inventors and explorers tend to be in the vanguard of the Leave campaign – they don’t allow irrational fear of small risks to keep them from trying for the big prize.

In the dour, homogenised world of mediocrity the EU bureaucrats and British civil service have created over the last decades, most people don’t seek the big prize, they look to avoid loss, the fear of which is being preyed on and blown out of proportion by the ‘In’ campaign’s usual suspects.

There is a glimmer of hope though. In a new poll conducted by IOS for the Mirror and Sun newspapers, there is evidence that a large section of the public has awoken from the miasma and smelled the coffee. They don’t trust Cameron to tell the truth about the EU.

There are still a lot of don’t knows there, but the tide is turning. I expect to see the ‘Leave’ campaign draw ahead in the coming weeks leading up to the referendum. We have the truth on our side, and the public is increasingly aware they have been sold a lie all these years.

As HL Mencken said:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.