We’re psychologically inclined to think of the current state of affairs as a baseline - meaning we’ll take any sort of change as a loss.
How do you avoid it?
Here’s the bad news: you can’t. But you can mitigate it. If you’re someone rolling out a company-wide change programme, for example, it means you’re always bound to get a little resistance at the beginning. But the easier you make it for people to do what you’re asking, the quicker you set a new status quo.
Where can you learn more about it?
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman has a lot to say about this in a paper called Anomalies.