# Escalation of commitment Escalation of commitment is the tendency to keep investing time, money or effort in a course of action that is clearly failing, and often to invest *more* after bad news. Barry Staw described it in 1976. In his experiment, business students playing the role of executives committed the most additional funds to a failing division when they had been personally responsible for the original decision. Staw explained it through self-justification: putting more in is a way to prove the first choice was right. It is related to the [[Sunk Cost Fallacy]] but broader. The sunk cost fallacy is about letting past, unrecoverable costs drive a decision. Escalation is the resulting behavior, and it has several drivers beyond sunk costs: personal responsibility, the wish to look consistent, social and political pressure, and organizational inertia. A 2012 meta-analysis by Sleesman and colleagues reviewed the many determinants proposed in the literature. The evidence is less uniform than textbooks suggest. A 2021 replication of Staw's design found no escalation at all (N = 365): participants simply invested more in the more promising projects. Escalation seems to depend on conditions rather than being automatic, and a common remedy (handing the decision to someone else) also had weaker and less specific effects than expected in a 2022 study. Why it matters: projects rarely get killed, they get extended. Setting kill criteria up front ("if X hasn't happened by date Y, we stop"), reviewing projects regularly, and separating the person who started a project from the one who decides whether it continues all make quitting easier when it's the right call. ## References - Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27-44. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90005-2 - Sleesman, D. J., Conlon, D. E., McNamara, G., & Miles, J. E. (2012). Cleaning up the big muddy: A meta-analytic review of the determinants of escalation of commitment. Academy of Management Journal, 55(3), 541-562. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0696 - Białek, M., et al. (2021). Escalation of commitment is independent of numeracy and cognitive reflection. Failed replication and extension of Staw (1976). Economics and Business Review. https://doi.org/10.18559/ebr.2021.2.2 - Schultze, T., et al. (2022). Does change of responsibility reduce escalating commitment? A replication and theoretical extension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000366 - Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124-140. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(85)90049-4 - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/escalation-of-commitment/ ## Related - [[Sunk Cost Fallacy]] - [[Loss aversion]] - [[Planning fallacy]] - [[Cognitive biases]] - [[Decision Making]] - [[Weekly review process]]