“You’re so stupid for staying with that pile of garbage.” This is one of many insults that might be lobbed at a woman struggling to exit an abusive relationship. It is an age-old story - he harms her, she leaves, he apologizes, she comes back. In a study done on 104 residents in a shelter for women escaping intimate partner violence (IPV), 66.7% of participants reported returning to an abusive significant other at least once. 77.3% of these women disclosed that their return was heavily influenced by a remaining emotional attachment (Griffing et al. 2002). As illogical as this may seem, it is a tragic cycle obviously prevalent in female IPV survivors. To help them break this cycle, we need to understand what propels it.
The sunk cost effect refers to the tendency to continue pursuing something one has already spent their resources on, even though it may not be serving them anymore (Macneil 2025). For example, you might despise your dead-end job, but you still refuse to quit because you have spent seven years there already. This is the sunk cost effect in action. A 2018 study by Dr. Brian M. Sweis found that mice, rats, and humans are all sensitive to sunk costs when making decisions (Sweis et al. 2018). Timed foraging tasks with various reward types were given to participants, mice, rats, and humans alike. The food-based tasks given to the mice and rats were based on a structure containing segregated areas containing different food types that the animals may or may not prefer. The amount of time the animals were willing to wait for each of the food offerings was measured. The humans underwent a similar task. They were asked to download videos depicting varying types of content. Again, the amount of time they were willing to spend waiting for a video to download before they either canceled the request or obtained the video was measured (Sweis et al. 2018). In the end, clear evidence was produced to suggest that sensitivity to sunk costs is a cognitive bias present across species.
Beyond universally appreciated rewards such as enjoyable food, the sunk cost effect may play a part in the reason survivors are so wont to stick with their abusers. Rui Nunes-Costa examines this connection in his 2018 paper, “Being Psychologically Abused Is Not Enough Into [sic] Ending a Relationship,”, (Nunes-Costa 2018). Nunes-Costa sought to understand whether a relationship, with or without the presence of IPV, will result in the sunk cost effect. He focused on financial hardship, perceived effort, and time spent as the sunk costs possibly involved. Participants were asked to numerically rate their willingness to stay in each of four relationship scenarios provided. Three scenarios described IPV, and one did not. All participants were adult women. The data collected showed a distinction between perceptions of psychological IPV versus of physical or sexual IPV. Inclination to remain in a situation that did not involve bodily harm did not appear to be determined by money, time, or effort (Nunes-Costa 2018). This indicates that even in a psychologically violent situation, participants were equally as probable to be impacted by the sunk cost effect as in a totally non-violent situation. Results also demonstrated that participants were more likely to be affected by the sunk cost fallacy as it pertains to relationships if they were already in one themselves (Nunes-Costa 2018).
Returning to or staying with an abuser is an extremely common action to be taken by IPV survivors. These decisions themselves are extremely complex, rife with a multitude of emotions. While the sunk cost effect seems to intensify the tendency towards these behaviors in some situations, it is just one possible piece of the puzzle. All IPV survivors should be treated with respect, dignity, and care, regardless of their choices to stay or not.
—
Griffing, S., Ragin, D. F., Sage, R. E., Madry, L., Bingham, L. E., & Primm, B. J. (2002). Domestic Violence Survivors’ Self-Identified Reasons for Returning to Abusive Relationships. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 17(3), 306–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260502017003005
MacNeil, C. (2025, February 12). How Sunk Cost Fallacy Influences Our Decisions [2025] • Asana. Asana. https://asana.com/en/resources/sunk-cost-fallacy
Nunes-Costa, R. View of Being psychologically abused is not enough into ending a relationship | Revista Interamericana de Psicología/Interamerican Journal of Psychology. (2025). Sipsych.org. https://journal.sipsych.org/index.php/IJP/article/view/1157/997
Sweis, B. M., Abram, S. V., Schmidt, B. J., Seeland, K. D., MacDonald, A. W., Thomas, M. J., & Redish, A. D. (2018). Sensitivity to “sunk costs” in mice, rats, and humans. Science, 361(6398), 178–181. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar8644
No comments:
Post a Comment