Escalation of Commitment: Why Bad Decisions Grow

The restaurant was losing money every month. Not a little — significant money. The owner knew it. His accountant knew it. His wife definitely knew it.

He'd sunk three years and everything he had into the place. So he borrowed more, redecorated, hired a PR firm. Spent another eighteen months chasing a turnaround that never came.

He's not unusual. You probably know someone like him. You might be someone like him — in a different context, with a different failing choice you're struggling to walk away from.

This is escalation of commitment in action. Barry Staw gave this pattern a name in 1976 — and once you understand the actual mechanism behind it, you'll see it in your own decisions with uncomfortable clarity.

Why You Keep Investing When the Evidence Says Stop

Staw published a study with a memorable title: "Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action." The title borrowed from a Pete Seeger folk song about a commander ordering his troops deeper into a river — past all reason — simply because he'd already given the order.

Staw wanted to know whether the same irrational deepening showed up in ordinary business decisions.

His design was deliberately clean. Participants — 240 business school students — read a scenario about a company with a failing division. Some were told they had personally made the original investment decision that created the situation. Others were told someone else had made that call. Both groups were then asked how much additional funding they'd allocate to the same failing division going forward.

The results were striking. Participants who had personally authored the original decision consistently allocated significantly more additional resources to the failing course than those who hadn't made that first call. The situation was identical for both groups. The evidence was identical. Only one variable differed: personal ownership of the original mistake.

Escalation of commitment, as Staw defined it, is the tendency to increase investment in a failing course of action specifically because you personally initiated it — distinct from simple optimism or momentum bias, and considerably more stubborn than either.

What's Actually Happening Inside Your Head

Here's the mechanism — and it explains why standard advice about "just cut your losses" so often fails in practice.

When you made the original decision, you didn't just make a choice. You put your judgment on record. And when that choice starts failing, walking away requires openly admitting your original judgment was wrong.

That admission carries a real psychological cost. It threatens your self-image as someone who makes sound calls. If others were aware of the decision, it also threatens your reputation with them. So the mind reaches for an alternative: keep investing. Frame the continued commitment as patience, conviction, staying power — anything other than what stopping would actually signal.

Psychologist Leon Festinger, who first described cognitive dissonance in the late 1950s, mapped the same underlying engine: when our actions contradict our self-image, we're driven to reduce that tension — not by revising the self-image, but by reinterpreting the evidence. Continued investment lets you tell a different story. Not "I made a bad call" but "I'm someone who perseveres through difficulty." The stories feel identical from the inside. The outcomes diverge sharply over time.

But it's irrational where it counts. You're making forward-looking resource decisions driven by a backward-looking need to justify a past choice. The question you should be answering — "Is this the best use of my resources right now?" — gets quietly displaced by a different one: "Can I still make my original decision look right?"

Those are not the same question.

Why Public Commitment Makes Everything Worse

Staw's broader research found something that makes this pattern considerably more uncomfortable: the escalation intensified specifically under public scrutiny.

When other people were aware of the original decision, the pressure to justify it through continued investment grew substantially stronger. The more visible the original commitment, the harder it became to reverse course without apparent loss of face.

Think about what that means practically. The decisions you're most likely to keep doubling down on aren't the quiet, private ones. They're the ones you told people about. The business you announced publicly. The career pivot you defended at dinner. The strategy you pitched in front of the whole room.

Public commitment doesn't just describe a decision. It creates a new psychological object you now feel responsible for protecting — a stated position with its own social weight, accumulating independent of whether the underlying evidence still supports it.

Jim Rohn used to say you need to stand guard at the door of your own mind. Staw's research suggests you also need to stand guard at the door of your own declarations — because a publicly stated commitment starts accumulating social weight the moment you speak it, and that weight will pull against your best judgment the moment the choice goes wrong.

how public commitments shape your follow-through and willpower

This Isn't Quite the Sunk Cost Fallacy

You've probably heard of the sunk cost fallacy — the principle that past expenses shouldn't factor into forward-looking decisions because you can't recover them. That's real, and it matters.

But escalation of commitment is something more specific, and the distinction is worth understanding precisely.

The sunk cost fallacy describes a reasoning error that can affect anyone evaluating a failing situation, regardless of who started it. Staw's research specifically isolated personal responsibility as the amplifying variable. Two people looking at the identical failing scenario, with the same sunk costs already spent, will make meaningfully different forward-allocation decisions depending solely on whether one of them personally authored the original call.

The escalation isn't just about money already spent. It's about the self-concept of the person who spent it.

cognitive biases that quietly distort your everyday decisions

This matters because it points toward a specific fix. Recognizing a sunk cost is necessary but not sufficient. You also need to honestly ask whether your resistance to changing course is coming from a genuine reading of the evidence — or from a need to protect your identity as someone who makes good calls. Those are different problems requiring different solutions.

The "Someone Else Made This Call" Test

The next time you're evaluating whether to keep investing in something that clearly isn't working, run this specific thought experiment: If someone else had made the original decision that created this situation, and you were being asked to evaluate it fresh right now, what would you honestly recommend?

Not vaguely. Specifically. Imagine a colleague walked into your office with this exact situation. They made the original call. Now they're asking your honest read on whether to keep going.

What would you tell them?

If your answer to that question differs meaningfully from what you're actually doing in your own situation, you've located your escalation. The gap between "what I'd recommend to someone else" and "what I'm actually doing" is a direct measurement of how much self-justification is distorting your judgment right now.

How to Start Today

The next time you notice yourself doubling down on something that clearly isn't working, try these four moves.

Write the situation in third person. Describe it as if it happened to someone else — a person made this choice, invested this much, and now faces these results. Then advise that person. The psychological distance often surfaces the honest answer that direct self-scrutiny can't.

Name the public scrutiny honestly. Is part of your reluctance tied to what you've already told other people? Acknowledge it explicitly to yourself. You can update others on a changed decision without framing it as failure — new information changes the math, and most people understand that far more readily than you think.

Distinguish the two questions. "Is continuing worth it given current evidence?" and "Can I make my original choice look right?" are genuinely different questions. Knowing which one you're actually answering in a given moment is more than half the battle.

Set a tripwire before you need it. Decide now what specific outcome, measurement, or date would cause you to genuinely reassess. Doing this before the pressure builds removes the distortion that comes from deciding under the weight of defending a past call.

how to make better decisions before you are under pressure

The Real Cost of Staying Knee-Deep

Every step deeper into the mud makes the next step backward feel more costly — more like an admission that the earlier steps were mistakes.

That's not a personal failing. It's a well-documented pattern that actually hits hardest on ambitious, high-stakes people — those who care deeply about their judgment and have publicly committed to their choices. If you're driven and proud of your thinking, you may be more susceptible to this bias, not less. That's a counterintuitive finding worth sitting with.

There's a simple reason for it. Ambitious people make more public commitments. They announce goals, declare strategies, and build identity around the quality of their judgment. Each of those qualities — the drive, the confidence, the willingness to go on record — is also exactly what the escalation bias needs to run. The same fuel that powers the original ambition powers the doubling-down.

The question isn't whether you're smart enough to see something isn't working. Staw's participants often did see it clearly. The real question is whether the psychological cost of admitting the original decision was wrong is distorting what you're actually willing to do about what you see.

The restaurant owner's most expensive decision wasn't the original one. It was the eighteen months he spent defending it.

Designing your evolution means being willing to update your choices when reality updates on you — not because your original judgment was foolish, but because new information changes the math. The future you're building is what matters. Protecting the story of a past choice costs you that future, one defended month at a time.

What decision are you still knee-deep in?