We often feel ourselves slipping into ruts we sewed long ago. As the story goes, the walls get steeper with each step forward making it that extra bit harder to crawl out of. We often spend so much time indulging in one path of action that we focus too much on what we've already lost and neglect what could be. It seems illogical to devote resources into a sinking ship. The reality is that due to various psychological and environmental factors people put all their efforts in bucketing out water and are blind to the life raft floating only a few feet away. Most willful decisions incorporate some sort cost/benefit analysis to help parse out the various possibilities. Is it worth abandoning one path and signing away all the resources already spent on it or should one hold out just a little longer, because maybe just that will be enough to see the results hoped for? What if someone else put in that effort for our benefit and are expecting us to live up to those expectations? These two flavors of sunk-costs play a defining role in how we debate with ourselves about our major life choices. It often takes out the agency of individuals as we are simply to follow the expected path laid out before us. It's this feeling of helplessness that leaves many depressed and lacking the ability to will themselves out of the rut- on their own at least.
Dr. Brian Sweis came to Loyola to give a seminar on some of his most recent research- part of it pertaining to the sunk-cost fallacy. At heart this common mistake is an economic one. He and his fellow researchers have observed that this trait is conserved among species- specifically in their research regarding mice. They trained the mice in an array of tests that attempted to distinguish between the amount of time the mice were willing to invest into obtaining food pellet rewards. They also further split the testing area into reward and offer zones. Sweis claims that the heuristic processes we incorporate into our decision making change depending on which “zone” we’re in. Through progressive trials the researchers saw that mice would tend to spend more times at specific types of pellets and were more willing to spend time waiting for their preferred treat. Another component of the fallacy more pronounced in these trials was that of the mouse waiting longer for the same reward than they would’ve earlier. What seemed to happen was that the mice believed that the longer they waited (i.e. the deeper the rut dug) the better the reward they would receive.
This research pairs nicely with a recent Time Magazine article done by Jamie Ducharme last July. Often we make decisions based purely on the sunk cost fallacy. This often leads to economically poorer choices that accumulate in our minds. Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon, wrote in the Journal Psychological Science stating that the fallacy itself is derived from the negative outcomes of committing to any decision. He likens it to satisfying a form of cognitive dissonance. We, or others, “pay” for something and we demand to get the appropriate return on that cost. People don’t inherently like being wasteful and thus it’s a natural course of action. Though referring to the previous point, sunk costs become a harm once they start dictating our lives and pushing us toward unfavorable ends. Guilt felt for not living up to someone’s expectations- such as a child not getting into the college their parents have been grooming for. It’s a burden as much as it’s a motivator. One so prevalent in our lives that it becomes our default. It’s a pattern of unhealthy behaviors that, while not a simple task, we need to relieve ourselves of.
Time Article: http://time.com/5347133/sunk-cost-fallacy-decisions/
“Sensitivity to “sunk costs” in mice, rats, and humans” Sweis Et. Al 2018.
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