Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

You’ve been at it for a while now, whatever the “it” is—a job, an academic pursuit, a business start-up, a relationship, a charitable endeavor, a military career, a sport. Maybe it’s a dream project you’ve been working on for so long you can’t even remember what got you all dreamy in the first place. In your most honest moments, it’s easy to see that things aren’t working out. So why haven’t you quit? At least three forces bias us against quitting. The first is a lifetime of being told by Churchill wannabes that quitting is a sign of failure. The second is the notion of sunk costs. This is pretty much what it sounds like: the time or money or sweat equity you’ve already spent on a project. It is tempting to believe that once you’re invested heavily in something, it is counterproductive to quit. This is known as the sunk-cost fallacy or, as the biologist Richard Dawkins called it, the Concorde fallacy, after the supersonic airplane. Its two patrons, the British and French governments, suspected the Concorde was not economically viable but had spent too many billions to stop. In simpler times, this was known as throwing good money after bad—but money is hardly the only resource that people toss into the sunk-cost trap. Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn’t like the idea of quitting. The third force that keeps people from quitting is a tendency to focus on concrete costs and pay ...