The Psychology of a Surge

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There are a lot of things you can call President George W. Bush's decision to send up to 24,000 fresh troops into Iraq: stubbornness, folly, or — an increasingly lonely position — a bold bid to save a worthy mission. What you can't deny is that it's one more thing too: entirely human. If there's anything nominally rational animals like us can't abide, it's the sense that we've wasted our time.

The human species grew up in the same world in which all other species did — which is to say a world of limited resources. Once we spend any of our precious hoarded capital — time, money, emotion, acorns — it galls us not to get something valuable in return. Somewhere in our primal wiring, we thus developed a defensive tendency to do precisely what we shouldn't do when faced with the risk of grave waste: press our bets.

It's hard to say just where in the brain the press-your-bet lobe lies, but if our behavior is any indication, it occupies a remarkably — and regrettably — powerful spot. It's that part of our makeup that causes the gambler who's lost $10,000 at the blackjack table push another $1,000 into the circle. It's that part that makes the restaurant owner whose business is failing throw a final $100,000 worth of renovations into the place before accepting the inevitable and declaring bankruptcy. It's that part that makes us go at least two exits farther on the highway than we need to go when we jolly well know we're lost and ought to get off and start all over.

"What we're driven by in these cases is what's called sunk costs," says Eric Stone, a cognitive psychologist at Wake Forest University who studies human judgment and decision-making. "Basically, a sunk cost is any resource that's already been spent and can't be reclaimed, but that affects your actions all the same."

There's a gravitational suck to sunk-cost behavior, one that makes it almost impossible to resist throwing fresh capital into the hole in the hope that lost capital will somehow come back out. Couples in a bad marriage who might be better advised to cut their losses will instead multiply them, buying a new house or having a new baby in the hope that that will bring them together again. Producers of a sinking movie will roll out a new ad campaign in the hope that that will get people to the box office. And, similarly, tacticians behind a floundering war will send living soldiers in to replace lost ones, even though stone cold reason tells them that troops killed on the battlefield today will not make the ones killed yesterday any less dead. "Rationally, you know you should deal with the situation as it is at the moment," says Stone, "but that's hard to do when your sunk cost is lost life."

Humans do, however, cross a threshhold for waste — a point at which the resources we've squandered are all we're willing to spend. Researchers studying consumer behavior are often struck by the fact that each minute callers spend on hold with customer service actually makes them more, rather than less, inclined to continue holding — at least for a while. "They'll tell you, 'I've waited 10 minutes so far. There's no way I'm going to hang up now,'" says experimental psychologist Walter Rolandi, who consults for gethuman.com, a Web-based advocacy group focussing on telephone service. Eventually however, an invisible line of disgust or hopelessness is crossed and it's then we at last start slamming down the phone.

What it takes for a nation to reach that point is unclear. The loss of the Challenger and its seven-person crew in 1986 did not prompt us to get out of the space shuttle game, but rather to double down our bet on a $1.7 billion replacement ship. It was only in 2003, when Columbia followed Challenger into the grave, that we at last committed to pulling the plug on the whole deadly enterprise. Washington's 25-year gamble on aggressive tax-cutting has not yet reached such an oops moment — despite a casino marker of $8 trillion so far — though the recent partisan turnover on Capitol Hill may suggest that the supply-side experiment is nearing its end.

To be sure, human history — to say nothing of human nature — is about more than merely pragmatism and judicious cutting of losses. There's a case to be made for to-hell-with-it persistence that just might pay off big, an idea the AA folks express as, "Don't quit five minutes before the miracle." President Bush, who knows a thing or two about sobriety and recovery, may be driven by that very idea — as well as by personal memories of missions that arguably quit at minute three or four: The father who had Baghdad in his cross hairs in 1991 and then turned away; the U.S. Army that squeezed Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, but failed to close the pincer. Of course, there is also the most mournful historical ghost of all: Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Johnson couldn't fold his hand either, and the marker he left the nation is one that in many ways we're still paying off.