A David Redish, Samantha V Abram, Paul J Cunningham, Anneke A Duin, Romain Durand-de Cuttoli, Rebecca Kazinka, Adrina Kocharian, Angus W MacDonald, Brandy Schmidt, Neil Schmitzer-Torbert, Mark J Thomas, Brian M Sweis
Sunk cost sensitivity describes escalating decision commitment with increased spent resources. On neuroeconomic foraging tasks, mice, rats, and humans show similar escalations from sunk costs while quitting an ongoing countdown to reward. In a new analysis taken across computationally parallel foraging tasks across species and laboratories, we find that these behaviors primarily occur on choices that are economically inconsistent with the subject's other choices, and that they reflect not only the time spent, but also the time remaining, suggesting that these are change-of-mind re-evaluation processes...
December 7, 2022: Communications Biology