ArticleFrontiers in psychology2021
Sensitivity to Sunk Costs Depends on Attention to the Delay.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reward pursuit during a translational reward task correlates with anhedonia reductions following rTMS in patients with major depressive disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Change-of-mind neuroeconomic decision-making is modulated by LINC00473 in medial prefrontal cortex in a sex-dependent manner.Science advances · 2025Article
- Doubling-Back Aversion: A Reluctance to Make Progress by Undoing It.Psychological science · 2025Article
- Neuroeconomically dissociable forms of mental accounting are altered in a mouse model of diabetes.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Statistical information about reward timing is insufficient for promoting optimal persistence decisions.Cognition · 2023Article
- Sunk cost sensitivity during change-of-mind decisions is informed by both the spent and remaining costs.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Distinct forms of regret linked to resilience versus susceptibility to stress are regulated by region-specific CREB function in mice.Science advances · 2022Article
- Computational validity: using computation to translate behaviours across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Apparent sunk cost effect in rational agents.Science advances · 2022Article
- Hate the wait? How social inferences can cause customers who wait longer to buy more.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In the WebSurf task, humans forage for videos paying costs in terms of wait times on a time-limited task. A variant of the task in which demands during the wait time were manipulated revealed the role of attention in susceptibility to sunk costs. Consistent with parallel tasks in rodents, previous studies have found that humans (undergraduates measured in lab) preferred shorter delays, but waited longer for more preferred videos, suggesting that they were treating the delays economically. In an Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) sample, we replicated these predicted economic behaviors for a majority of participants. In the lab, participants showed susceptibility to sunk costs in this task, basing their decisions in part on time they have already waited, which we also observed in the subset of the mTurk sample that behaved economically. In another version of the task, we added an attention check to the wait phase of the delay. While that attention check further increased the proportion of subjects with predicted economic behaviors, it also removed the susceptibility to sunk costs. These findings have important implications for understanding how cognitive processes, such as the deployment of attention, are key to driving re-evaluation and susceptibility to sunk costs.
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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.