Sunk Cost Fallacy

This is yet another perspective to not letting an action of the past control your present and your future.

How often have we gone to a movie, realized we didn’t like it in the first half hour and yet sat through the whole movie? Ordered food in a restaurant, didn't like it, yet forced ourselves to finish it? Been in a relationship, known it's not working out, yet dragged it on?  Why do we do that?

It's also called the concorde effect...that's why the picture :)

Typically, the thought process is…I’ve already spent so much time, energy and or money on this, I might as well watch it, eat it , want it, whatever .

Does that make sense? No, it’s actually absurd. You are now spending more time and energy on it......or rather you are now consciously wasting time and energy on it. Creating a negative out of a space you don't need to. 

It’s called the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is most dangerous when we have invested a lot of time, money, energy or love in something. This investment becomes a reason to carry on. The more we invest, the greater the sunk costs are, and the greater the urge to continue becomes.

This irrational behavior is driven by a native need for consistency. After all, consistency signifies credibility. We find contradictions uncomfortable. If we decide to cancel, for instance, a project, halfway through, we create a contradiction: we admit that we once thought differently.

From personal experience....a question I'm asked the most ...'But weren't you in love with him? Wasn't it all good?'. Yes, I was and Yes it was.....but people evolve, and at times we evolve differently. We all agree its dynamic right?

Anyways, this is something not just individuals, but even teams, organizations and also governments are apparently victim to.

Back to the picture....it's also called the Concorde Effect because that's what happened with creation of the Concorde. Both, Britain and France, had long known that the supersonic aircraft business would never work, yet they continued to invest enormous sums of money in it. Abandoning the project would have been tantamount to admitting defeat, and neither was ready to do that.

It leads to costly, even disastrous errors of judgement. ‘I’ve read so much of this book already.‘But I’ve spent two years doing this course.’ 'I've already paid an years membership to the club'. If you recognize any of these thought patterns, it shows that the sunk cost fallacy is at work in a corner of your brain.

Of course, and needless to say, if there may be good reasons to continue investing in something, by all means do.  Just beware of doing so for the wrong reasons. Rational decision-making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date. No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. Think ahead.......... Better still, think from the present :)