The Role of Goal Source in Escalation of Commitment
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Escalation of commitment is an important decision problem that occurs across different decision contexts. Recognizing that escalation involves one's effort to achieve some form of a goal, researchers have attempted to understand escalation of commitment as a goal-pursuing activity. Prior research works have suggested that escalation situations consist of (1) an initial goal setting phase and (2) an escalation decision-making phase and have investigated how goal difficulty and goal specificity influence escalation decisions. However, they have neglected the potential role of the goal source in escalation situations. In this study, we aim to advance our understanding of escalation of commitment by examining the relationship between goal source and escalation. Specifically, by drawing on distinct characteristics of escalation situations, we conceptualize a new form of goal source, namely inherited goals, and examine its effect on escalation of commitment compared with self-set and assigned goals that are well-known goal sources in goal-setting theory (GST). We conducted two laboratory experiments and found evidence suggesting that individuals who had inherited goals (i.e., those who did not take part in initial goal setting and did not invest effort in pursuing the previous course of action) are less likely to fall into the escalation trap.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it