| Summary: | When people have
invested resources into an endeavor, they typically persist in it, even when it
becomes obvious that it will fail. Here we show this bias extends to people’s
moral decision-making. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 1592) we show
that people are more willing to proceed with a futile, immoral action when
costs have been sunk (Experiment 1A and 1B). Moreover, we show that sunk costs
distort people’s perception of morality by increasing how acceptable they find
actions that have received past investment (Experiment 2). We find these
results in contexts where continuing would lead to no obvious benefit and only
further harm. We also find initial evidence that the bias has a larger impact
on judgment in immoral compared to non-moral contexts. Our findings illustrate
a novel way that the past can affect moral judgment. Implications for rational
moral judgment and models of moral cognition are discussed.
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