Psychic cost

Definition

A psychic cost refers to a cost imposed on a person in the form of added stress or unhappiness. Such a cost may arise due to guilt, regret, shame, fear, frustration, or some other related feeling.

The couterpart of psychic costs are psychic benefits.

Examples

The term psychic cost could be used for two, somewhat different, kinds of costs. The first kind of psychic cost is a cost incurred directly due to emotions that a certain kind of activity engenders. For instance, police or army officers who need to shoot others in the course of duty experience trauma.

The more indirect psychic costs are ones that arise due to knowledge of something rather than direct experience of it. For instance, if I feel stressed because people whom I have no direct knowledge of are starving, that is a psychic cost imposed on me. Such indirect psychic costs differ from the direct ones since the extent to which these costs are felt by me depends more on what information I have at my disposal than what is actually happening.