| Popis: |
We will explore how a person’s proneness to experience shame influences their tendency to exhibit the sunk cost bias. The sunk cost bias occurs when people continue a failing endeavour simply because they have previously invested time, money, or effort into it. As these costs cannot be recovered (they are "sunk costs"), they should not affect future decisions. Yet, people are often motivated by sunk costs to continue in these circumstances even when continuing would offer no apparent benefit. In these types of situations, we suggest that one reason why people tend to justify future actions with past unrecoverable costs is that they feel stopping will be acknowledging a failure and would likely lead the person to experience shame. In order to avoid this experience of shame, we think that individuals will try to withdraw from the possible situation that would cause them to experience it. This might lead to continuing with a failing endeavour despite it leading to no ostensible benefit (other than perhaps the benefit of avoiding shame in the present moment). In our work, we will examine the decision-making of individuals in sunk cost scenarios and assess the extent to which they feel shame during these scenarios. We will also have them complete measures meant to assess how prone they are to experience shame in everyday life. Ultimately we hope to better understand a widespread bias in human decision-making - the sunk cost bias. |
