De‐escalation after repeated negative feedback
Emergent expectations of failure
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12166264 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brian J Zikmund-Fisher (0000-0002-1637-4176, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, corresponding author), Brian J Zikmund‐Fisher |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 365-379 |
| Publication date | 2004-11-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0894-3257 • E-ISSN: 1099-0771 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/bdm.478 |
| OpenAlex | W2040759135 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 36 |
Research on willingness to make marginal investments (e.g., the escalation and sunk cost literatures) has often focused on project completion decisions, such as the “radar‐blank plane.” This paper discusses a fundamentally different type of marginal investment decision, that of couples deciding whether to continue infertility treatment in the face of repeated failures. Two experiments based on this context show that when people face multiple independent chances to achieve a valued goal but are unsure about chances of success, premature quitting or “de‐escalation” is the norm. Repeated negative feedback appears to induce individuals to see each successive failure as more and more diagnostic. As a result, even a short series of failed attempts evokes beliefs that future attempts will also fail. These emergent expectations of failure, generated by causal attribution processes, associative learning, and/or discounting of ambiguous information, appear very compelling and induce people to forgo profitable marginal investments. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Attribution · Context (archaeology · Discounting · Economics · Microeconomics · Sunk costs · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Economic and Environmental Valuation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology · Finance
An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion
On the Self-Regulation of Behavior
Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology
Gambling with the House Money and Trying to Break Even
Hypothesis evaluation from a Bayesian perspective.
The psychology of sunk cost
Recent developments in modeling preferences
The base-rate fallacy in probability judgments
Between Hope and Fear
Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms
The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
Entrapment in Escalating Conflicts
Ducking the collection of costly evidence
The role of probability of success estimates in the sunk cost effect
Ambiguity and rationality
The discounting of ambiguous information in economic decision making
Factors affecting withdrawal from an escalating conflict
Outcome bias in decision evaluation
The illusion of control
The empirical case for two systems of reasoning
Belief in the law of small numbers
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |