Process Loss Aversion

When Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman mapped loss aversion, they established the asymmetry between losses and gains in the evaluation of outcomes. The discourse about AI and professional disruption applies this asymmetry to outcomes: the devaluation of a skill, the erosion of status, the threat to income. But there is a second item in the professional's endowment that the standard analysis consistently misses—not the output of expertise but the process of producing it. The surgeon does not only value the completed operation; she values the absorbed concentration of performing it. The engineer does not only value the working code; she values the hours of frustrated, illuminating struggle through which the code was earned. When AI removes the task, it removes the process along with it, and the process was itself a possession subject to loss aversion. Process loss aversion names this second dimension of the endowment—the attachment not to what the expert produces but to what the expert experiences