[ QUOTE ]
EV is one consideration, but hardly the most important. If someone offered to give me $2 million or flip a coin for either $5 or $5 million, I wouldn't have to think about it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Exactly. This game is easy to play by the numbers. But it's also good comparison to playing above your bankroll in poker limits. If I was on the game the first offer I had over 10grand or so I'd take it just because I'm flat ass broke, no matter what the EV. And unless these people are millionares there's NO reason they should be rejecting these 100k+ offers even if it's -EV.

There's a cardplayer article that talks about this, but it's from the opposite side... that people gamble with their losses, but don't with sure gains. they fail to mention how much this 3,000 would affect the people surveyed.
CP Link
[ QUOTE ]
Understanding Poker Errors Through Prospect Theory — Part II
With Co-author Rachel Croson
by Barry Tanenbaum

...
Asymmetric risk preferences: When it comes to gains, people are risk-averse. That is, when they are given the chance to win $100 for sure or flip a coin for $200, they tend to choose the sure win. However, when it comes to losses, individuals are risk-loving. That is, they prefer a fifty-fifty chance of losing $200 to a sure loss of $100. In a more striking example, researchers asked 95 subjects which they would prefer:

A. Winning $3,000 for sure

B. Winning $4,000 with an 80 percent chance
Of course, the expected value (EV) of B is higher than the expected value of A ($3,200 is larger than $3,000), yet 80 percent of the subjects chose option A. Could it be that these subjects just did not like to gamble? Not really, because later in the experiment, these same subjects were offered the following choice:

C. Losing $3,000 for sure

D. Losing $4,000 with an 80 percent chance

Here, the expected value of C is higher than the expected value of D (-$3,000 is larger than -$3,200), yet 92 percent of the subjects chose option D. Now these same subjects are risk-loving, willing to sacrifice the $200 of expected value in order to take the gamble. In other words, people would rather take a sure profit than a good gamble, but would rather take a bad gamble than a sure loss.

To seasoned gamblers, this is a very surprising result, in that the vast majority chose the proposition with the worse EV each time. However, at the poker table we see this behavior all the time, as the following examples show.

...


[/ QUOTE ]

edit: I don't know if this is a good example, but say you have worked hard for a long time to build your bankroll to the limit you want to play at. and one day you go on and somehow you accidently join the highest NL game where your whole bankroll is on the line. 1st hand--you're in the BB with AA, UTG goes all in and it's folded around to you, do you call with your entire bankroll even though it's major +EV? hell no, you get the [censored] out.