Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (4 page)

And there's more.
Writing in the
Harvard Business Review
, Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman pointed out that the above-­average effect has another corollary or two. First, we tend to be overly optimistic about outcomes, exaggerating their probability in much the same way we do our talents. Mind you, under the right circumstances, optimism is a very good thing, as is tenacity. Optimism fuels our efforts when we're in the right place, with the right skills, and the right goal. And without optimism, few of us would succeed at anything. But—yes, there is a
but
—in the free fall that escalation of commitment ultimately becomes, delusional optimism just speeds up the cascade. It's not just that we tend collectively to be optimistic about the future; it's also that we don't necessarily look at past experience as an indicator of how the future will play out. Human beings look forward in abstract and general terms, uncluttered by the sometimes spotty details of past experiences.

Lovallo and Kahneman also explain that our tendency to exaggerate our abilities is amplified by how we attribute cause to success and failure. While people take credit for positive outcomes, they also tend to attribute negative ones to external factors, which they see as out of their personal control. These two ways of thinking are factors in the escalation of commitment, the more so because quitting isn't a consideration but is only a last resort.

And one more thing: for all that we tend to overrate our skills, human beings are also very, very touchy about having that point of view readjusted. That's another reason that people will escalate their commitment under fire. As many studies have shown, when people receive a bunch of bad news or negative feedback about a venture they've committed to, they're far more likely to escalate their effort than they are to scale down or pull out, no matter how persuasive or negative the feedback.

We've already seen some of the ways the mind recasts the situation for persistence, but it actually goes beyond all of that. The more money, time, energy, and effort a human being has invested and the
greater the personal responsibility he or she feels for the initial decision, the more likely he or she is to persist. Justifying the initial decision trumps all and by investing even more in it, the person feels as though he is actually validating himself and his initial reasoning.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, but people do it all the time, in their personal and business lives, individually and collectively.
Studies show that a manager
who was personally responsible for hiring an underperforming employee is far less likely to fire the employee than a manager who had nothing to do with the hiring. Instead, the manager will escalate his or her commitment to the initial decision to hire the employee. On a corporate level, where teams of people make decisions, bad news is usually greeted the same way. People do it with failing marriages and even with old cars they've decided to hang on to.

The car that ultimately becomes a clunker is the perfect example of how the “reasoning” behind the escalation of commitment works. Patrick and his wife Barbara disagree on whether to buy a new car or maintain an old one. Patrick wants to keep the old car. He wins the argument and begins to spend money maintaining the car—new tires, new brakes, new muffler, and whatever else the mechanic says it needs. Typically, as the expenses mount up, he's more likely than not to be hopeful that this—whatever “this” is—will be the last repair he has to make. The more money he pours into the car, the more likely he is to continue investing in it since his focus shifts from the piece of metal in front of him to the dollars he's sunk into it.

The fancy name for that is the
sunk-cost fallacy
and it's yet another engine for persistence.

Giving In to the Sunk-Cost Fallacy

The
sunk-cost fallacy
is a mouthful and its name makes it sound more complicated and esoteric than it actually is. Basically, when we let what we've already invested in a situation dictate our decision
about whether to keep going, we're invoking the sunk-cost fallacy. For Patrick, it's the car; for Jennifer, our unhappy lawyer, it's the time, money, and effort that went into her law degree, the four years she's spent at the firm, and the potential promise of making partner. The term
sunk-cost fallacy
comes out of economics, where it describes how investors decide whether to go forward on a problematic venture that has already had a significant investment of money.

The sunk-cost fallacy is so prevalent in our thinking that we can see it at work in how our leaders talk about war or military efforts and how ordinary people talk about everything from investments and jobs to real estate and marriages. The sunk-cost fallacy is persistence's cheerleader and the naysayer to quitting.

Take, for example, the logic that pervaded the thinking of America's leadership about sending troops to Vietnam even as it acknowledged that winning, in the conventional sense, was impossible. Leaders invoked the sunk-cost fallacy by saying that if the country quit, the loss of life already incurred would be wasted.

On the face of it, this argument is illogical—how could the possibility of more people dying justify the deaths of others who came before?—but many people actually justify persisting in situations because of what they've already invested. This kind of thinking trumps the adage “Don't throw good money after bad” because people are generally hesitant and unwilling to (1) admit that what they invested is lost and (2) take the risk of quitting prematurely. They're often more willing to invest even more before they concede the loss, largely on the off chance that hanging in longer will reap the big payoff. Both the culture of persistence and the onus on quitting keep the sunk-cost fallacy going.

The investment of time and energy—and the unwillingness to quit and call it a lost cause—keeps people in place. It also stops them from reframing the situation they find themselves in, imagining a new goal, and reinventing themselves. The sunk-cost fallacy influences decision-making when people think about leaving a long-term marriage, a job or career to which they've devoted much time and effort, and many other situations, large and small.

The Bird in the Hand

You know the expression “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Scientific research shows not only that the saying accurately describes how people behave but also that human beings are willing to do just about anything to hold on to that bird.

Stories often emphasize how people are more inclined to be risk takers when there's the possibility of gain—mortgaging their house and the like—but it turns out not to be true.
As Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
discovered, when we weigh our future prospects, the scales aren't evenly balanced. As surprising as it may sound, when weighing possible gains against possible losses, human beings are a very conservative lot. People are far less inclined to take a risk in the name of gain, but they are willing to do almost anything to avoid a certain loss. Paradoxically, their
loss aversion
, as it's called, encourages them to become risk takers. Loss aversion is a key component in human psychology when it comes to judgments about whether to persist in an effort.

How sensitive people are to losses
or cuts was demonstrated by a completely counterintuitive but remarkably revelatory research experiment in which people were asked which job they would prefer. The first one paid $30,000 to start, $40,000 at year two, and $50,000 the third year. The other choice was one that paid $60,000 the first year, $50,000 the second, and $40,000 the third. Despite the easy math, people actually preferred the job with the increases, even though it actually paid less.

Not surprisingly, loss aversion amps up the escalation of commitment, as the following story shows. A professional in the communications industry, Robert had been very successful at bringing teams of disparate people together to work on commercial projects, but he'd never worked on anything that was both personally and professionally satisfying. Finding such a project became an important goal. A dedicated environmentalist, he conceived of putting together a consortium of experts who would pool their knowledge
and create a national platform on sustainable living. For six years, he worked on recruiting both individuals and groups of scientists, engineers, farmers, chefs, and others who were already committed to sustainability to participate. He envisioned a bank of information on the subject—a go-to source of books, videos, and Web information. It took time to get everyone on board, more time to sign a contract, and even more time to come up with a sustainability platform everyone could agree on. His investors were signed on.

Two of the professional groups suddenly changed their minds. They now wanted to showcase their members, not the principles of sustainability. This wasn't, of course, what they'd agreed to, but Robert made whatever concessions he could to keep the venture going. The more concessions they demanded, the more Robert escalated his commitment and the more fractious the in-fighting became. But time after time, the concessions weren't enough.

Robert was well aware that the project had veered off its original course. Even so, he still thought he could make it work. Then he learned that the groups had solicited the other experts because they wanted to take the project over for themselves. Even worse, Robert's investors were talking to them. His project had been hijacked.

There were lots of arguments to justify tenacity. He had a track record of success in communications, and it didn't seem likely that the other participants, no matter how vocal they were, had the expertise to pull it off. The idea for the project had been his, and he'd acted in good faith. He had countless hours, not to mention years, tied up in the project. He had every reason to believe that succeeding at the project would further his career. He wouldn't and couldn't let all he'd put into the project go to waste.

Until Robert put quitting on the table, he wasn't able to see that his commitment was taking up all the mental and emotional energy he had, even though that commitment was, in fact, getting him no closer to getting what he wanted. He continued to escalate his commitment for months until his hand was forced and he had to consider giving up.

The Perceived Value Conundrum

When we embark on a goal, few of us anticipate every obstacle, and unfortunately, realistic or clear thinking and persistence aren't necessarily good bedfellows or even teammates.
Researchers have found that when problems
plague the pursuit of a goal, people will weigh two factors to decide whether to continue on. The first factor is how valuable the goal is. Not surprisingly, the more valuable the goal is perceived to be, the more inclined the person will be to persist. The second factor is the strength of the expectation of success. Again, the stronger the belief in success, the more likely the person is to stay the course.

All of this sounds straightforward enough on the surface, but once again, human nature intervenes. As researchers have found, the frustration caused by being thwarted can actually make the goal appear even more valuable than it was initially. Up to a point, the level of commitment rises in proportion to both how unavailable—and, hence, valuable—the goal appears to be. As in the Greek myth of Tantalus, who is punished by never being able to grasp the fruit dangling from the branch just above his head, the goal becomes literally more tantalizing by virtue of its being out of reach.

This phenomenon shows up in all walks of life and in almost every circumstance. Anything unattainable—the lover, the dream house, the ideal job—becomes that much more valuable to the beholder because it can't be had. Again, the conscious act of considering quitting opens up possibilities that can't be looked at otherwise: the recognition that the energy and the emotional investment we've committed to the impossible dream could be put into the service of a goal that might actually make us happy.

The Problem with White Be
ars

As if it isn't enough to discover that when we think we're thinking logically and hard when we're really not, it's also true that we don't
act just on the basis of conscious thought or motivation either. We're motivated to act by unconscious thoughts as well. The
unconscious
here isn't the term made famous by Freud—all those repressed childhood memories and experiences—but something else entirely. Despite all the human brain's amazing capacities—it writes sonnets, puts a man on the moon, invents the iPhone!—it doesn't work the way we think it does. Or as Daniel Wegner explains,
“The slowness of consciousness suggests
that much of what we see and do involves the operation of
preconscious
mental process.” Yes, this sounds as though your brain is thinking without your knowing it is and that you're going about your business in the world, doing what you're doing, on the basis of thought processes you don't even know about. While it may make you uncomfortable thinking about human “will” in those terms, that's pretty much the case. Let us explain.

Take the pursuit of a goal. It can be any goal—getting a promotion, taking Friday off and playing golf, keeping the peace at a family gathering—and if you had to write down what pursuing that goal would look like on paper, you might do it like this:

A. Define the goal.

B. Think about how to achieve it.

C. Formulate actions and strategies.

D. Act.

E. Reflect on how actions are bringing the goal closer.

Most people assume that steps A through E are conscious in the literal sense of the word and accompanied by thought processes that are totally deliberate.

The truth, though, is a bit more complicated than that, in part because of the brain's limited capacities. Some of what it does has to be on automatic because, if these processes weren't, they would take up too much of the brain's attentional capacity. Some actions are intentionally automatic. Take backing the car out of the driveway. If you can remember the first time you actually did this, the memory
you'll summon up is doubtless a nervous and frazzled you, trying desperately to concentrate, twisting your head. The likelihood is that when you back out now, you're probably doing other things as you do—turning on the radio, talking on the phone, thinking about what you need to do first thing. We don't need to argue the usefulness of that kind of automaticity. But there is another equally automatic process, which lies beyond our conscious perception, in which choices in situations are automatic as well. That's the process by which “goals and motives will be automatically activated by situations,” even though we're unaware that they have been.