Never Give Up...

...Is terrible advice in this scenario. Bad call, initiate. You, along with Gamble, have fallen victim to 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.

Gamble should have cut his losses when he had the chance. Acting on your advice, Gamble spent all of his money and had nothing left at the end of the night. Maybe we can find a way to make it up to him in the future, but you're on thin ice, initiate. Report back to HQ and we will evaluate your performance.

Debriefing