The more we learn about the human brain and cognitive bias, it’s easy to understand why sunken cost fallacy impacts so many areas of life. In layman’s terms, sunken cost fallacy is human tendency to continue with an investment endeavor even after the costs outweigh the ultimate benefits of our effort.
In other words, when someone mentally approaches a point of no return, they ignore negative feelings and internally decide, “I’ve gone down this path for so long, that I may as well stay on it.”
Obstacles and setbacks that would dissuade outside observers with no vested interest from continuing, but those signs aren’t as strong or as clear to investors with a sunken cost fallacy mindset. In the realm of politics, a case could be made that sunken cost fallacy persists among Trumps most devout supporters, which prevents any alternative Republican candidates from tying or surpassing Trump in his second campaign for a second term.
Consider a similar leader and group: Rev. Jim Jones and the members of his church, the People’s Temple. They were willing to stick with Jones in the middle of an isolated jungle because they had already uprooted from their roots in the United States and emigrated to Guyana to develop ‘Jonestown’, a commune where Jones ruled with a fascist’s iron fist.
Both Trump and Jones capitalized on the mindset of supporters by asserting that they were the only man capable of rescuing their followers from peril and leading them to a promised land.
Jones told the People’s Temple, “I’m a savior. The only savior in the whole damned country.”
Donald Trump told the Republican National Committee: “I am your voice, said Trump. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.”
Jordan Vilchez, is a former member of Peoples Temple, wrote that Donald Trump’s behavior as “all too familiar”, and described the similarities betweenTrump’s final days in office, and Jone’s final days in Jonestown.
“As I observed everything that happened between election day and the eve of the insurrection, I was transported back to my own first-hand experience of witnessing what happened with another man when the world closed in on him, was on a swift slide towards losing his power,” Vilchez said. “He could not be bailed out for his transgressions, nor pay anyone to cover up his behavior, nor escape the carnage of his own socio-pathological behavior. Like Donald Trump, this man was willing to take everyone down with him. Although we in the Temple espoused principles of freedom, human dignity, and social justice — the basic tenets of our nation — the followers displayed a well-meaning façade, even as we saw those ideals succumb to the whims of our leader. We came to believe that what he said and did, signified the means to achieve those ideals….Worst of all, we became inured to it all. And in the end, did not Trump’s lies about election fraud become a thing of normalcy rather than an aberration? Shouldn’t we have considered that an intolerable assault on the trust of the people of our nation?”