Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking

Individuals often allow prior investments of time, money or effort to influence their current behavior. A tendency to allow previous investments to impact further investment, referred to as the sunk-cost fallacy, may be related to adverse psychological health. Unfortunately, little is known about th...

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Main Authors:	Jarmolowicz, David P., Bickel, Warren K., Sofis, Michael J., Hatz, Laura E., Mueller, E. Terry
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Springer International Publishing 2016
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5047866/

id	pubmed-5047866
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-50478662016-10-18 Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking Jarmolowicz, David P. Bickel, Warren K. Sofis, Michael J. Hatz, Laura E. Mueller, E. Terry Research Individuals often allow prior investments of time, money or effort to influence their current behavior. A tendency to allow previous investments to impact further investment, referred to as the sunk-cost fallacy, may be related to adverse psychological health. Unfortunately, little is known about the relation between the sunk-cost fallacy and psychological symptoms or help seeking. The current study used a relatively novel approach (i.e., Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing [AMT] service) to examine various aspects of psychological health in internet users (n = 1053) that did and did not commit the sunk-cost fallacy. In this observational study, individuals logged on to AMT, selected the “decision making survey” amongst the array of currently available tasks, and completed the approximately 200-question survey (which included a two-trial sunk cost task, the brief symptom inventory 18, the Binge Eating Scale, portions of the SF-8 health survey, and other questions about treatment utilization). Individuals that committed the fallacy reported a greater number of symptoms related to Binge Eating Disorder and Depression, being bothered more by emotional problems, yet waited longer to seek assistance when feeling ill. The current findings are discussed in relation to promoting help-seeking behavior amongst individuals that commit this logical fallacy. Springer International Publishing 2016-10-03 /pmc/articles/PMC5047866/ /pubmed/27757371 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40064-016-3402-z Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Jarmolowicz, David P. Bickel, Warren K. Sofis, Michael J. Hatz, Laura E. Mueller, E. Terry
spellingShingle	Jarmolowicz, David P. Bickel, Warren K. Sofis, Michael J. Hatz, Laura E. Mueller, E. Terry Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
author_facet	Jarmolowicz, David P. Bickel, Warren K. Sofis, Michael J. Hatz, Laura E. Mueller, E. Terry
author_sort	Jarmolowicz, David P.
title	Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
title_short	Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
title_full	Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
title_fullStr	Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
title_full_unstemmed	Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
title_sort	sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking
description	Individuals often allow prior investments of time, money or effort to influence their current behavior. A tendency to allow previous investments to impact further investment, referred to as the sunk-cost fallacy, may be related to adverse psychological health. Unfortunately, little is known about the relation between the sunk-cost fallacy and psychological symptoms or help seeking. The current study used a relatively novel approach (i.e., Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing [AMT] service) to examine various aspects of psychological health in internet users (n = 1053) that did and did not commit the sunk-cost fallacy. In this observational study, individuals logged on to AMT, selected the “decision making survey” amongst the array of currently available tasks, and completed the approximately 200-question survey (which included a two-trial sunk cost task, the brief symptom inventory 18, the Binge Eating Scale, portions of the SF-8 health survey, and other questions about treatment utilization). Individuals that committed the fallacy reported a greater number of symptoms related to Binge Eating Disorder and Depression, being bothered more by emotional problems, yet waited longer to seek assistance when feeling ill. The current findings are discussed in relation to promoting help-seeking behavior amongst individuals that commit this logical fallacy.
publisher	Springer International Publishing
publishDate	2016
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5047866/
_version_	1613670568908816384

Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking

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