Simon Sinek explains a common leadership bias — the sunk cost/effort-justification effect — using Elliot Aronson’s book-club experiment: people who worked harder to gain entry (testing/surveys) rated a deliberately dull book club as much better than those who did not, illustrating how prior investment makes people believe something is valuable.
Chapters
There's a lot of leaders who are plagued by this, which is, we have to do it. Why do we have to do it? Because look how much time and money we've invested. There's a psychological bias which I write about. Elliot Aronson, the psychologist, the American Psychologist, one of my favorite. They got a group of people and they put them into a very boring book club. Very, very boring. Everyone in there was purposefully, intentionally dull. And then they asked them how good the book club was and they all gave a score. So these people that were put into that, then they got another group of people and they made them go through a rigorous testing process and surveys to get into the book. People that had done the rigorous testing and surveys and applications to get into the book club, even though it was dull and boring, reported that the book club was amazing and was much better than the people that hadn't fought to get in there. And it speaks to this kind of, like, sunk cost idea that leaders have where just because we've worked hard on something, they trick them themselves into believing that it is good and that it must be good. That's. It's a psychological bias.
