<
https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-sunk-cost-fallacy-is-it-ever-a-good-thing-217798>
"Have you ever encountered a subpar hotel breakfast while on holiday? You don’t
really like the food choices on offer, but since you already paid for the meal
as part of your booking, you force yourself to eat something anyway rather than
go down the road to a cafe.
Economists and social scientists argue that such behaviour can happen due to
the “sunk cost fallacy” – an inability to ignore costs that have already been
spent and can’t be recovered. In the hotel breakfast example, the sunk cost is
the price you paid for the hotel package: at the time of deciding where to eat
breakfast, such costs are unrecoverable and should therefore be ignored.
Similar examples range from justifying finishing a banal, half-read book (or
half-watched TV series) based on prior time already “invested” in the activity,
to being less likely to quit exclusive groups such as sororities and sporting
clubs the more effort it took to complete the initiation ritual.
While these behaviours are not rational, they’re all too common, so it helps to
be aware of this tendency. In some circumstances, you might even use it for
your benefit."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
