It's Ridiculously Hard to Admit Our Mistakes. Here's Why.

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Runners make fluid pace shifts throughout a course based on changing conditions and their own energy reserves. Likewise, skillful pacing in any arena calls for frequent reckoning and self-assessment: deliberate pauses, brief or drawn-out, when you consider where you are now, where you want to head, and what adjustments you can make to get there.

This kind of assessment shapes everyday decisions, but it can also shift the larger trajectory of our lives. One of the commonest pacing errors involves shrinking from the discomfort that this reckoning brings up. This error, called the “sunk cost fallacy,” happens when you cling so tightly to past choices you’ve made — related to your career, finances, relationships, or beliefs — that changing your course feels unthinkable.

“Humans want to be seen as consistent,” Snow College psychologist and sunk-cost expert Veronika Tait told me. “Changing course feels like we have to admit we’ve made a mistake. It’s easier sometimes to double down.”

What sunk-cost thinking looks like in real life

These days, sunk-cost thinking abounds in the political sphere, where those who refuse to deviate from past choices may find themselves allied with conspiracy theorists. But this kind of thinking error also crops up in less dramatic ways that can profoundly affect our lives' rhythms, as I write in my new book The Art of Pacing.

For instance, you may embrace a major decision—going to law school, living abroad, choosing a life partner—jump in full-tilt, and tell yourself and others how much that choice means to you, even though you secretly harbor doubts. You may not admit until years later, if ever, that the experience you talked up was an outgrown hermit-crab shell, one you should have abandoned much earlier.

While dislodging sunk-cost thinking can be incredibly difficult, studies suggest it grows easier when we count the costs of staying stuck. Though people showed varying levels of sunk-cost bias in one Canadian experiment, they were more likely to change course when they acknowledged the harm of sticking with a bad choice.

To correct entrenched sunk-cost bias, Tait advises letting go of the dead weight of past choices, even those you’re deeply committed to, and doing what's right for your future self. “Just consider, ‘Would I still be making this choice if I hadn’t made that investment?’” she says. “Focus on what’s going to be best moving forward.”

Copyright Elizabeth Svoboda. A version of this article appears in my newsletter.