Vicarious entrapment: Your sunk costs, my escalation of commitment

Individuals often honor sunk costs by increasing their commitment to failing courses of action. Since this escalation of commitment is fueled by self-justification processes, a widely offered prescription for preventing escalation is to have separate individuals make the initial and subsequent resource allocation decisions. In contrast to this proposed remedy, four experiments explored whether a psychological connection between two decision-makers leads the second decision-maker to invest further in the failing program orchestrated by the initial decision-maker. Across three different contexts (financial investments, personnel decisions, and auctions), we found that multiple forms of psychological connectedness (perspective-taking, shared attributes, and interdependent mindsets) led decision-makers to vicariously justify others