Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2011 Aug;18(4):767-73. doi: 10.3758/s13423-011-0099-4.
The sunk cost bias occurs when individuals continue to invest in the same option when better alternatives are available. Many researchers believe that this bias is due to overemphasizing the past investment over the (missed) opportunities offered by alternatives. As an alternative or complement to this view, we show that memory retrieval and attention play important roles in the sunk cost bias. In two experiments, individuals generated more reasons for pursuing the invested option than for an alternative; they generated those reasons earlier in a sequence of reasons; and these effects increased as the individuals made progress toward attaining the reward yielded by the invested option. Associated with these effects, individuals perceived an increasingly wide gap in value between the invested and alternative options as they progressed toward the goal, thereby creating the sunk cost bias. Forcing individuals to reverse the order in which they generated reasons for the invested and alternative options reduced the bias. [corrected]
当个人在有更好的选择时继续投资于同一选项时，就会出现沉没成本偏差。许多研究人员认为，这种偏差是由于过分强调过去的投资，而忽略了替代方案提供的（错过的）机会。作为对这种观点的一种替代或补充，我们表明，记忆检索和注意力在沉没成本偏差中起着重要作用。在两项实验中，与替代选项相比，个人为投资选项生成的理由更多；他们在理由序列中更早地生成这些理由；并且这些效果随着个人朝着投资选项产生的奖励迈进而增加。与这些影响相关的是，随着个人朝着目标前进，他们对投资和替代选项之间的价值差距的感知越来越大，从而产生了沉没成本偏差。强迫个人颠倒他们为投资和替代选项生成理由的顺序，可以减少这种偏差。
