ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2018
Sensitivity to "sunk costs" in mice, rats, and humans.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hyperdopaminergic States Bias Explorations-Exploitation Trade-Off in Foraging and Impair Survival.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Reward pursuit during a translational reward task correlates with anhedonia reductions following rTMS in patients with major depressive disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Addressing degeneracy in rodent studies of cognition.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- A multi-country study to co-design and evaluate digital educational resources to support conversations about ending fertility treatment.Human reproduction (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Best-of-n decision making by human groups.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- On the Low Reliability of Sunk Cost Vignettes.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Change-of-mind neuroeconomic decision-making is modulated by LINC00473 in medial prefrontal cortex in a sex-dependent manner.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Doubling-Back Aversion: A Reluctance to Make Progress by Undoing It.Psychological science · 2025Article
- Building momentum: A computational account of persistence toward long-term goals.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Foraging animals use dynamic Bayesian updating to model meta-uncertainty in environment representations.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Neuroeconomically dissociable forms of mental accounting are altered in a mouse model of diabetes.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Goal commitment is supported by vmPFC through selective attention.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- A Double Hit of Social and Economic Stress in Mice Precipitates Changes in Decision-Making Strategies.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- A widespread electrical brain network encodes anxiety in health and depressive states.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Foraging Under Uncertainty Follows the Marginal Value Theorem with Bayesian Updating of Environment Representations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Distinct value computations support rapid sequential decisions.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Statistical information about reward timing is insufficient for promoting optimal persistence decisions.Cognition · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Sunk costs are irrecoverable investments that should not influence decisions, because decisions should be made on the basis of expected future consequences. Both human and nonhuman animals can show sensitivity to sunk costs, but reports from across species are inconsistent. In a temporal context, a sensitivity to sunk costs arises when an individual resists ending an activity, even if it seems unproductive, because of the time already invested. In two parallel foraging tasks that we designed, we found that mice, rats, and humans show similar sensitivities to sunk costs in their decision-making. Unexpectedly, sensitivity to time invested accrued only after an initial decision had been made. These findings suggest that sensitivity to temporal sunk costs lies in a vulnerability distinct from deliberation processes and that this distinction is present across species.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.