Ego traps us in costly, losing battles, study finds:

"A gambler plunges deeper into debt when crushing losses should scream to him to quit. A banker keeps lending to someone who clearly won’t pay back. A leader pours troops and money into a war that has become a quagmire.

After a protracted bidding war, some participants in an experiment spent more than $3.70 trying to buy one dollar. Researchers say the game was a small example of how ego entraps people in costly, losing ventures.

These scenarios have something in common: in each, someone is entangled in a costly, protracted and losing venture. It happens quite often.

Now, researchers say they may have confirmed a key reason why people fall into what the scientists call “costly entrapment in losing endeavors.”

Their finding, based on a study of monetary choices, might be unsurprising to many observers of human nature: it comes down to ego.

Threatened egotism, in particular, “makes people more prone to become entrapped in losing endeavors,” two psychologists wrote in the study, published in the July issue of the research journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Egotism, they wrote, is “the motivation to maintain and enhance favorable views of self.” Admitting an unwise decision threatens such views, they added. To avoid that, people slog ahead with failed courses of action despite mounting losses.

The study consisted of four experiments on college students. In each, the participants received some cash, and an opportunity to gamble or play it in games of skill or luck. These games were mostly losing propositions, by design.

Some of the players were also subjected to vague put-downs, or “ego threats.” These students, the researchers found, were likelier to plunge more and more money into the game, and lose it. “Individuals commit more to a losing course of action when their ego involvement is higher,” the researchers wrote: for these hapless players, personal affronts transformed the games into ego battles.

Since the experiments involved financial choices, it’s unclear whether the findings apply to other human behaviors, such as war, one of the psychologists said. But “in principle, absolutely” they could, added the researcher, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla... [more]

Baumeister is pretty highly regarded in his field and co-authored the very good paper in 2003, Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles? [pdf 44 pgs] I'm hoping to get an interview with him for the book.