On the Fear of Cutting the Loop of Commitment

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” — Leonardo da Vinci.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We’re wired so that once we’ve made a decision, the mind quietly switches on the machinery for justifying our choice — even when every argument and every gut feeling says the choice was wrong. The fear of losing the effort and money we’ve sunk grows right along with how deep we are in. Hoping for the happy ending that will pay all our costs back tenfold, we keep absorbing the reputational, financial and emotional losses, drifting closer to an outcome that may well be grim.

Canadian psychologists ran a study showing that bettors’ confidence in their chosen horse at the track rises sharply the moment after they’ve placed the bet.

“Automatic” consistency in our actions, useful as it often is for sane, rational behavior, can become a trap — especially when it’s used against us, or when we use it to deceive ourselves.

Some examples:

— When the price of a stock he bought drops below his stop-limit, the investor, instead of selling, buys more to “average down.” The price keeps falling, and rather than book the loss, he buys again, and again. Then come the leveraged buys, the margin call, the loss of everything, and possibly a debt to the broker on top of it. A professional trader would have admitted the trade didn’t work, taken the loss, and gone back to hunting for new opportunities in the market.

— You’re offered what looks, at first glance, like a profitable business partnership. Over time the hidden snags surface — the ones nobody mentioned up front. To fix the situation and avoid losing what you’ve already put in, you’re talked into getting in deeper, investing a bit more, leaning in just a little harder so it all finally works out and everyone makes money. As a rule, there will be no happy ending, and the moment logic or intuition tells you the targets are unlikely to be hit, it’s better to end the partnership as early as you can, writing off the losses, than to push on and take far heavier ones.

— A contractor isn’t meeting his obligations, drags out the deadlines, shifts the blame onto third parties and onto the unfairness of the universe. I’ve given in more than once myself when colleagues urged me to give such a contractor another chance, figuring it’s harder to replace him than to let him finish the job. In practice, though, it’s almost always better to replace an underperforming contractor as early as possible with someone more qualified, even at extra cost, so the work gets done and reputational risk is avoided. Even counting the time it takes to find someone new, it usually pays off.

— A young man starts courting a young woman (or the other way around), and maybe even feels something genuine. Sadly, at the level of chemistry she doesn’t feel the same — but she accepts the courtship, the compliments, the gifts, goes on the dates, spends the time. His expectations grow; she starts justifying both herself and him: “what if he’s the one?” She reaches for logical arguments, but you can’t fool the heart. The result — a painful breakup, or a relationship with no love in it. Honesty at the very start, with each other and with themselves, would have saved time and spared feelings.

Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence, offers an interesting idea about what to do once you’re already caught up in a story where intuition is telling you something’s wrong, but you keep justifying yourself and your earlier moves because you’re already in too deep.

In his example, he pulls off the highway into a gas station after seeing an ad for supposedly low prices, only to find the price at the pump is much higher. You’d think: well, since I’m already here and I need gas anyway, easier to overpay and get back on the road. But the author asked himself a question: “Would I have turned in here if I’d known in advance they’d lie to me about the price?” Getting an inner “no,” he turned around and drove off, breaking free of the manipulative chain of false expectations and automatic actions.

This approach works in any situation. Would I sign a contract with this contractor, knowing he won’t deliver? Would I buy this stock? Would I walk into this relationship? It doesn’t matter that we can’t predict the future. What matters is that if, with the information we already have, here and now, the answer is “no,” that’s reason enough to think seriously about cutting the loop of commitment — about admitting that something has gone wrong and that radical change is needed.

The tactic of getting us just a little bit involved is the great marketing trick of our time. All it takes is one small action from us — and we may already be on the hook.

Here’s to the skill of saying “no,” even when it feels like it’s already too late! 😎