Cut Your Losses

Good work, initiate! You have helped Joseph Gamble avoid The Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy occurs when people continue to invest more funds, time, or other resource into some task or goal that they have already invested a good amount of those resources in (Nash, Imuta, & Nielsen, 2018). Because people have invested resources into something, they feel that by abandoning it, their investment is wasted. They then use this logic to continue investing in that thing, despite better options being available. Joseph Gamble feels like, since he has already invested so much time and money into the slot machine, if he were to stop playing, he would have wasted his money. However, in reality, Joseph Gamble has wasted his money whether or not he continues to waste more of it. Even if he wins a small prize now and then, it would still not make up for his losses. The only way to actually justify spending all that money on the slots, would be if Gamble won a large prize, and the odds of that are so slim, they don't even warrant calculation.

You have helped Gamble to see that continuing to play the slots would only cause him to lose more money, which could never justify the money he already spent. By cashing out when he did, Joseph Gamble was actually able to leave the casino with some money left in his pocket, a rare occurrence indeed! Gamble is quite grateful for your help, and has informed us that he will definitely be using our services in the future. All that's left now is for you to report back to HQ so we can evaluate your performance.

Debriefing