Escalation of Commitment in the Life Sciences

Escalation of commitment is a behaviour characterized by persisting in a course of action despite negative feedback. Despite substantial research attention from diverse disciplines, there are still gaps in our knowledge of escalation of commitment. The work described in this thesis targets two of these gaps—the lack of conceptual clarity around escalation of commitment and escalation of commitment's effects on decision making in the life sciences. The lack of conceptual clarity around escalation of commitment has led to problems, such as the inability to distinguish the concept from similar concepts. In Chapter II of this thesis, I describe the results from a review of the literature. Based on my reading of previous research, I find that some elements of escalation of commitment have been inconsistently included in its definition, and I argue that their consistent inclusion would help to address the problems of conceptual clarity and conflation with other terms. The second gap that I address is the lack of research on escalation of commitment's effects in the life sciences. I use the proposed conceptualization that I arrived at in Chapter II to inform two pieces of empirical research. In Chapter III, I describe the results of an online experiment conducted with 427 professionals from the pharmacology and biotechnology sectors. The goal of the experiment was to investigate escalation of commitment's role in drug development decision making. I found that decision makers who were successful in bringing drug development projects to the market in the past were overconfident in their abilities to do so in the future, which led them to escalate their commitment to a failing project. In Chapter IV, I describe the results of a case study conducted to explore escalation of commitment's role in public health decision making. I analyzed official government communications around the COVID-19 pandemic, and found that several factors, such as goal specificity and moral reasoning style led to higher escalation of commitment towards a course of action that received negative feedback. I believe that the work in my thesis carries important contributions for the escalation of commitment literature and decision making in the life sciences.