As a result of this emotional baggage, then, no amount of reasoned argumentation is enough to create a wholesale shift into digital and multimodal composing in first-year writing programs. The exhortations about the need for it or about the benefits of it alone cannot create enough of a wave of change without first first finding ways to address the pathos of the situation. As Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out, “We can’t make decision making rational.” We think we can, but it turns out that it is just not the way it works.

Kahneman and Tversky find time and again that in decision making situations, humans feel perceived loss about twice as strongly as they feel the pleasure of perceived gain. In a later study, Kahneman et. al. conclude:

A central conclusion of the study of risky choice has been that such choices are best explained by assuming that the significant carriers of utility are not states of wealth or welfare, but changes relative to a neutral reference point. Another central result is that changes that make things worse (losses) loom larger than improvements or gains. (199)

This psychology of risky choices,then, where fear of loss or failure often outweighs possible benefits, coupled with the anxieties surrounding digital, networked, and multimodal composing, can provide insight into why there is still considerable reluctance to “widening our understanding of the bandwidth of literacy” (Selfe “Aurality”).

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