[florbnit]

I feel like there’s scientists must have spent a long time researching this seemingly new phenomenon before discovering that the sunk cost fallacy was widely studied. And at that point rather than spend the effort to correct their conclusions they decided to double down and spend even more effort on trying to spin their work as something new and unrelated to the sunk cost fallacy.

[seanhunter]

…thereby falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy themselves, amusingly.

Reminds me of the medical researcher Mary Tai[1] who published "A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves" (ie reinvented integral calculus) and tried to double down in a similar fashion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai's_model

[ameliaquining]

From the paper (internal citations omitted):

"This newly documented phenomenon has similarities with and differences from the sunk-cost fallacy; we see them as part of the same family of effects. In one instantiation, the sunk-cost fallacy can dissuade people from completing a goal (e.g., attending a show) if their initial investment failed to yield a return (e.g., a purchased ticket was lost). With doubling-back aversion, the question is not whether people complete a goal but rather what may discourage them from doing so efficiently. In another example, people display unwarranted escalations of commitment—irrationally persevering on a goal—in the hopes of delaying (and possibly escaping) an admission that their initial investments were actually misguided. Losses simply pile up as a result. Doubling-back aversion discourages people from issuing a course correction even when doing so would not require them to accept responsibility for choosing that longer course in the first place. After all, our participants had to travel down a pathway to even see that there was another route available or were first assigned to complete a task in a particular way before they were offered an alternative. That said, both phenomena emphasize that people do not want to take actions that would force themselves to view their previous efforts as a waste, although with doubling-back aversion it was not a waste that they could have avoided."

Is this the most groundbreaking study ever? No. But the researchers do seem to have found something worthy of comment, and I see no reason to believe that they weren't aware of the existing literature on the sunk cost fallacy when they started working on this. In general, you can't dismiss a study as trivially flawed or useless based solely on a popularization for general audiences; such popular explanations often omit context required to make the study make sense for scientifically literate people. Read the actual paper before dismissing it.

[FallCheeta7373]

It's really subtle the difference between motives of "I have invested so much in this so I feel bad wasting that effort" v/s "I don't feel like turning back, if there's a way forward, I would take it"

[LeftHandPath]

I wonder if the sunk cost fallacy - that usually refers to an abstract cost, like time or money - would truly be the same effect as an aversion to retracing a path in 3D space.

Possible, or even likely, but interesting nonetheless. Towards the end of the article, they describe an interesting other direction of their research that's not so directly correlated with sunk cost:

> More recently, we’ve been examining a related form of hesitation. This time, it’s not in switching paths, but in committing to one at all.

> “While it might seem that having enticing options (e.g., a great apartment one could rent, a fun event one could sign up for) would make commitment easier, we’ve found that it’s often the loss of a great option that finally pushes people to choose. People often hold out for something even better, but the disappearance of a pretty good option inspires some pessimism that encourages people to grab onto what is as good as they can get for now.”

[burnt-resistor]

This is exactly my thought. I think what they've really discovered their own "publish or perish" grasping at straws reinvention by way of the emperor's new clothes. Perhaps that, in and of itself, requires future funding and publication if we're being 360 degrees honest.

[bhk]

"Scientists reveal a previously unidentified term for a widely known phenomenon"

[jimkleiber]

The irony, eh?

Having the sunk cost fallacy while researching the sunk cost fallacy.

[mozeu2]

I see what you did there