This is why youll keep doing something you hate

This is why youll keep doing something you hateThis is why youll keep doing something you hateWhen we are trapped in a sunk-cost fallacy, we get too stubborn to walk away from an objectively schwimmbad decision. We will not cut our losses and run, because we have invested too much money, time, and energy towards it. Behavioral scientists have long called us out on this trap.Now, theres new research that finds we can get roped into other peoples sunk-cost decisions too. Did someone choose a bad vacation spot? Were not likely to cancel. Now thats our harte nuss too.This is why youll wear your aunts scratchy, gaudy sweaterWhen you see someone make a bad, unprofitable decision that they cannot get out of, you wont abandon them to their fate. Youll shovel down cake even when you are full if you know your coworker drove across cities to get it. Youll agree to keep watching that terrible hotel movie if your partner already bought it. Youll keep going to tennis lessons your family member pai d for, even if it pains you.These were the kinds of experiments, Christopher Y. Olivola, an assistant marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business, tested. He found that we will keep forging ahead on someone elses bad decision, feeling their aversion to loss and regret as our own. Participants were more likely to choose the less enjoyable alternative when someone else had invested substantial time or money to obtain it (sunk cost for other high/present) than when that same person had invested little or nothing (sunk cost for other low/absent), he wrote.It does not even matter if the decision maker followed through on their bad investment. I repeatedly observed a sunk-cost effect when the person incurring the cost was someone other than the decision maker. Moreover, this occurred even when that person would not observe whether the decision maker honored his or her sunk cost, Olivola said in his paper.This is an irrational impulse because presumably, th e decision maker would not want us to be miserable.Their past sunk investments do not justify making ourselves less happy,Olivola said. And yet, we continue to have hero complexes. We want to save people from themselves, especially when we know what their decision cost them.Imagine, for example, receiving a rather gaudy and uncomfortable sweater from a well-intentioned aunt and consider how your willingness to keep it and wear it at family events would be affected by learning that she had saved a months salary to purchase it, Olivola said. I suspect that many readers would find it psychologically more difficult to discard the sweater in light of their aunts significant investment.