Do you have an expensive but uncomfortable pair of shoes or jeans at the back of your cupboard that you never ever wear, but you simply cannot throw away because to do so would be to admit defeat and recognise that you wasted a lot of money? If so, you are suffering from the sunk-cost bias or fallacy.
Help is at hand in the form of a new study by researchers at INSEAD in Singapore and The Wharton School at the The University of Pennsylvania. Andrew Hafenbrack and his colleagues claim that just fifteen minutes practice at mindfulness meditation reduces people’s vulnerability to the sunk-cost bias – our usual tendency to persist with lost causes because of what we’ve already invested.
Mindfulness meditation is all about learning to stay in the moment, and the researchers think it probably helps reduce the sunk-cost bias because the error is partly caused by memories of prior investments, and also by anticipation of regret in the future if a project or prior purchase is abandoned.
