The Fallacy of Sunk-Cost Fallacy

***Let me preface this by saying, I believe sometimes it’s essential we cut bait on things we have invested in. Not everything in life is worth our continued time and attention.***

So, what is sunk cost fallacy?

Let’s take Monica on Friends for our example here. In the episode “The One With Monica’s Boots” she buys a pair of really expensive, but super fabulous boots. Like, costs-more-than-Manhatten-rent boots. She promises Chandler she will wear them every day and that they go with every outfit, so they’ll be worth the investment.

(I know, I know, we see where this is headed.)

But the boots suck. They are excruciating, but she keeps wearing them. By the time she realizes she should return them, she can’t because they made her bleed her own blood. But she justified the initial purchase by asserting she’d wear them ‘all the time’, so she still keeps wearing them.

This is sunk cost fallacy. We have an investment in something that we can’t retrieve, so we just keep going with it. Even though continuing to further dig our heels in (wow, pun not intended. but puns are always appreciated around here) could have actual, further costs associated with it.

But, in my experience, the area where I see people all-too-willingly cut bait on their investments is when it comes to art.

I see it when people have certain expectations as to the outcome of a shoot or a roll of film. If these images don’t live up to their lofty ideals, they shove them aside, and consider it wasted.

According to sunk cost fallacy, this is the prudent thing to do: we’ve invested, but it isn’t going how we want, so we should cut ties with that investment.

But I would argue art is the area in which we should keep going.

“But why?”

I’m so glad you asked.

Because in art, our own expectations and ideas of “success” are often flawed. We get tunnel vision when we create, and that tunnel vision keeps our necks stiffly stuck forward. We need to loosen up so we can look all around us.

I kept this in mind when I shot a roll of film for The Art Lab’s January prompt. We were working on pieces inspired by the TS Eliot line in his poem ‘Burnt Norton’ (the first in the Four Quartets). The line is “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

I had the idea to try cubism for the piece, so I shot a roll of self-portraits with the plan of somehow piecing them together. The idea behind it being that we cannot see all sides at once because of our finitude. We have restrictions on how we navigate the world through time and space, but all the sides all still there, whether we can see them or not.

BUT UGH did I hate the whole roll. I hated the black backdrop I chose to shoot against. (the black backdrop issue honestly bugged me most) I wasn’t in the frame like I had anticipated. I hated the way I was piecing things together in Photoshop. It just didn’t feel like me. As I say “I film because I can’t Photoshop”. My work is in-camera because that’s the way I’m most comfortable telling my story; I’m not good at constructing them digitally on the back-end, and that’s exactly what I was trying to do here.

Keeping in mind sunk cost fallacy, I actually debated on what to do. I thought to myself, “it’s probably smarter to cut bait and try something else. It will end up taking less time, provide less frustration, and I will most likely end up happier.”

But the creative in me spoke up. She reminded me that my most favorite pieces often come creating within the constraints. She pushed me to try to keep going and think outside of the box.

The absolute contrarian in me won out as I embraced the fallacy of sunk cost fallacy and doubled down on what I had started with. I was going to run with this until the end, whether it be bitter or triumphant.

I decided I needed to proceed in an analog fashion. If I was going to construct a story on the back-end, I knew it needed to be more analog than digital, because Photoshop and I don’t do great together. I had to turn my negatives into actual prints.

I embarrassingly have two enlargers in my hobby dungeon basement, but have zero darkroom. I do, on the other hand, have the ability to create cyanotype prints, so I ran with that.

With a wintertime UV index of 1, it took over half an hour for the prints to bask in the intermittent sunlight, but it worked. I got images. I hacked them down to size and pieced them together.

I used my flatbed to scan the results before taking it just one step further. I toned the image in black tea in hopes of achieving a richness I witnessed before rinsing my cyanotypes. At this point, I knew I had finally reached the end of the road.

Turns out the end of the road was more sweet than bitter and I actually kind of….liked the cyanotype? I didn’t prefer the toned version, but the blue one was something I could live with. And that black backdrop I hated? It was perfect for achieving the rich, blue surrounding my portrait in the cyanotype version.

cyanotype toned in black tea

The piece ended up growing on me, and I’m actually kind of proud of it at this point.

I allowed the fiasco to push me. I followed its beckoning to think outside of the box and make and share something I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with. I’ll be doing more cubism. More playing with prints. More stepping out of my comfort zone.

If you need a push to step outside of yours, please join us in The Art Lab! We’d love to have you. Learn more here.