Escalation Of Commitment

“Escalation of commitment, simply put, is like this, we have the intuition that when we get bad news, that we'll stop doing what we're doing. And actually, we don't stop. When we get bad news, we actually double down. We escalate our commitment to the cause.”

“We think it's about some costs, but the most powerful drivers are not economic. They're emotional. It's ego and image. I don't want to look like a bad decision maker. I don't want to see a bad decision maker in the mirror.”

“There's really amazing work, some from Katie Milkman and Maurice Schweitzer, which shows this escalation of commitment, that when things are going poorly, we actually escalate our commitment.”