The Impact Of Decision Goal And Cognition Needs On Sunk Cost Effect

Decision-making is an important activity in our daily life. Many theoretic models of decision-making consider that the decision maker is fairly rational, but literatures in the "heuristics and biases" bear the view of "bounded rationality". The sunk cost effect is the irrational tendency to choose to continue to invest money, effort or time. The study of decision-making in the field of Psychology which is different from other subjects pays attention to the impact of strategy and our characters on decision-making. Many researches have demonstrated the sunk cost effect is affected by decision goal, regret, initial investment, mental account and situational factors. It is unclear that decision goal and individual difference affect the sunk cost effect. This article is seeing about the impact of decision goal and cognition needs on decision outcomes.With the method of situation priming to agitate decision goal, Study 1 takes merchant investment in real life as the decision-making task by measuring individual difference of cognition needs to explore the impact of both on decision outcomes. The results indicate that decision goal types and cognition needs have significant impact on decision outcomes as well as a significant interaction.Study 2 takes merchant investment in real life as the decision-making task to investigate the impact of decision goal definition and cognition needs on decision outcomes. The results indicate that decision goal definition and cognition needs have significant impact on decision outcomes, but decision goal definition and cognition needs have marginal significant interaction.As a whole, the results of two experiments hopefully furthered our knowledge about the effect of decision goal,anticipant value and individual difference on the sunk cost effect. Future research will make use of the same decision tasks and employ multiple scales to measure individual difference in decision- making, so that the nature of decision goal and individual difference may be better understood and controlled. Furthermore, the possible interactions of situational factors and individual differences should still be topics of future researches.