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The Effect of Progress Framing and Risk Levels on The Escalation of Commitment

Author: ChenYan
Tutor: DuXiuFang
School: Shandong Normal University
Course: Applied Psychology
Keywords: Progress framing Project completion Risk level Escalation of commitment
CLC: F062.4
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2012
Downloads: 48
Quote: 1
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Abstract

There are a lot of decisions people need to make in daily lives, but people makedecisions not always rationally. Escalation of commitment is a kind of irrationalbehavior in decision fields. It is that people encountered negative feedback whendoing the project and if continue to adhere to the project will result in totally failure,at this moment they should withdraw from the project to avoid greater losses, butmany people actually continue to work on the previous projects investing moreresources and try to recover the losses. Since Staw have presented the concept ofescalation of commitment in 1976, the research on this kind of behavior havebecoming a hot study spot in decision fields in the next 3 decades. Many researchershave made their own researches on project characters, decision scenes, emotions andthe individual differences to study the kind of irrational behavior and tried to find outthe factors which can affect the decision under the escalation dilemmas. Theresearchers have presented that the self-justification theory, prospect theory, ExpectedValue Theory and decision dilemma theory to explore the psychological mechanismof escalation of commitment.Based on the previous researches, we want to systematically explore how theproject completion, progress framing and risk levels influence the behavior ofescalation of commitment in two studies.These experimental materials are decision scenes of escalation dilemma materials.We manipulate the risk levels directly in study 1 and manipulate the risk levelsindirectly in study 2. We used a 2×3×3 mixed design, and the progressframing(past-oriented frame, the future-oriented frame ), project completion(the highproject completion, the middle project completion, the low project completion) andrisk levels(the high risk level, the middle risk level, the low risk level) as the independent variables. We use the choose marks of escalation of commitment as thedependent variables. In the three independent variables, the progress framing and risklevels are between-subjects variables, the project completion is within-subjectsvariable. In the two experiments, we use college students as subjects in two studies,and ask the students to choose the possibility of their willing to continue invest in theproject A in a 10 rank tables.The result reflects that: (1) The decision risk levels significantly influenced theescalation of commitment, with risk level is the highest, the escalation of commitmentis the least.(2) The project completion s significantly influenced can influence the escalationof commitment. Under the high project completion, the decision makers will moreincline to commit to the project A, under the middle project completion, they willcommit less. But under the low project completion, they will commit the least.(3) The influence of progress framing to the escalation commitment was affectedby project completion. Only under the middle project completion, the decision makershowed the progress framing effect. The decision-maker chosen higher marks to theproject A under the past-oriented frame than under the future-oriented frame. Underthe middle and low project completion, the decision maker did not show the framingeffect.(4) The influence of the risk levels to the escalation commitment was affected byproject completion. The result shows that subjects under high project completionshow significantly difference in escalation of commitment. Under the high projectcompletion, subjects under the high risk level commit less than subjects under themiddle and low risk level. In study 1, the result shows that subjects under middleproject completion show significantly difference in escalation of commitment. Underthe middle project completion, subjects under the high risk level commit less thansubjects under the middle and low risk level. But in study 2,we did not find this effect.

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