Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action.
@article{Staw1976KneedeepIT, title={Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action.}, author={Barry M. Staw}, journal={Organizational Behavior and Human Performance}, year={1976}, volume={16}, pages={27-44} }
1,874 Citations
THE ESCALATION OF COMMITMENT IN SEQUENTIAL DECISION MAKING: SITUATIONAL AND PERSONAL MODERATORS AND LIMITING CONDITIONS*
- Psychology
- 1986
Two laboratory studies manipulated variables in order to observe their effect on the escalation of individuals' commitment to earlier investment decisions. The experimental results indicated that…
Escalating commitment to a failing course of action: Separating the roles of choice and justification
- Psychology
- 1994
The escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is often attributed to self-justification motives that presumably are evoked by personal responsibility for initiating the original action…
Escalation: The Determinants of Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action
- Psychology
- 1977
Previous research has shown that individuals are most likely to escalate the amount of resources committed to a course of action when they have been personally responsible for negative consequences.…
Escalation of commitment with transparent future outcomes.
- PsychologyExperimental psychology
- 2005
In an experiment, escalation was demonstrated when full information was given about investment alternatives and estimates of future returns, indicating that people may escalate despite knowing that it will not make them economically better off.
Escalation of Commitment: When To Stay the Course?
- Business
- 2014
When an important venture seems to unravel, decision makers may face a dilemma. Do they persist and risk becoming caught up in a spiral of escalating commitment, or “apply the brakes” when they may…
Escalating Commitment to a Course of Action: A Reinterpretation
- Psychology, Sociology
- 1986
Escalating commitment to a losing course of action is usually attributed to a need on the part of decision makers to maintain the illusion that they have not erred. Prospect theory suggests a…
DE-ESCALATION IN DECISION MAKING: A CASE OF A DISASTROUS PARTNERSHIP*
- Psychology
- 1995
Decisions to persist with losing courses of action known as escalation have been widely studied, albeit mainly in an experimental context. Comparatively little is known about the conditions under…
Real Options and Escalation of Commitment: A Behavioral Analysis of Capital Investment Decisions
- Computer Science
- 2009
The main result demonstrates that the use of real options in capital budgeting can affect the behavior and decisions of the user even in an experimental setting that controls for the informational advantage of using real options.
Can group decision-making mitigate propensity of escalating commitment?
- Business
- 2008
Escalation of commitment is a well-known investment trap, which is irrational from an economic point of view but inevitable due to psychological factors. Based on a role-playing experiment, this…
Can PROMOD Prevent the Escalation of Commitment?: The Effect of a Group Facilitation Technique on an Investment Decision
- Psychology
- 2008
In the present study, the escalation of commitment was examined, i.e. the tendency to invest too much in projects, when to decide at a second time about a further investment in the same project. Many…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 43 REFERENCES
Personal responsibility-for-consequences: An integration and extension of the “forced compliance” literature
- Psychology
- 1972
Decision freedom as a determinant of the role of incentive magnitude in attitude change.
- Psychology
- 1967
In the forced-compliance paradigm, attitude change following a counterattitudinal performance has been shown to be both a direct (reinforcement prediction) and an inverse (dissonance prediction)…
Postdecision dissonance at post time.
- PsychologyJournal of personality and social psychology
- 1968
Results from both studies provide support for Feslinger's theory in a real life setting and indicate that dissonance-reducing processes may occur very rapidly following commitment to a decision.
Attribution of the "causes" of performance: A general alternative interpretation of cross-sectional research on organizations.
- Psychology
- 1975
Cognitive consequences of forced compliance.
- PsychologyJournal of abnormal psychology
- 1959
The theory behind this experiment is that the person who is forced to improvise a speech convinces himself, and some evidence is presented, which is not altogether conclusive, in support of this explanation.
Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique.
- PsychologyJournal of personality and social psychology
- 1966
Significant evidence is produced that greater external pressure generally leads to greater compliance with the wishes of the experimenter, and the one exception appears to be situations involving the arousal of cognitive dissonance.
Increasing cognitive dissonance by a fait accompli.
- PsychologyJournal of abnormal psychology
- 1959
An experiment is reported in which a fait accompli does appear to have increased cognitive dissonance, and it may be concluded that a, fail accompli can affect the magnitude of dissonance.