Despite some people's love for gambling, humans are generally pretty risk averse - even when the odds are in their favour, as the video above shows.

In it, Veritasium's creator Derek Muller hits the streets to see if people will take a pretty straightforward bet. Will they risk $10 over the flip of a coin? What if they stood to win $20?

After convincing them that he's legitimate, pretty much everyone says no, even when the odds were definitely in their favour. At one point he even offers participants the chance of taking the bet 10 or 100 times in a row - which means they'd almost be guaranteed to not only win their $10 back, but also make money.

So why are we so unwilling to risk $10 to potentially make hundreds of dollars? As Derek explains, we're psychologically much more sensitive to loss than we are to gain.

Research has shown that most people value a loss 1.5 to 2.5 times as much as a win, which means that although the odds may be in our favour, it would take a far greater potential gain to part with $10.

And over time, this can be a bad thing. Although no one is recommending you head out and hit the roulette table, over the course of a lifetime we're often faced with many opportunities that have favourable, but not guaranteed odds.

If we say yes, we may lose occasionally, which means that we generally tend to say no. But statistics show that over a lifetime of saying yes to risks where the odds are in your favour, overall you'll come out on top.

Watch the video above to find out more about how humans feel about risk. And next time you shy away from saying yes to a less stable job, an investment opportunity or even a date, remember, your brain is probably telling you the potential loss would be a lot worse than it really is. 

Oh, and as Derek sagely notes on his YouTube page: "The video is not saying to accept every bet, only those with reasonable odds (preferably in your favour), and those which if you lose would not cause significant financial or other damage. In those cases it is wise to be loss averse!"

So be brave (but clever).

Source: Veritasium