"What-the-hell" Cognitive Failure Mode: a Separate Bias or a Combination of Other Biases?

I believe this is related to the way Schelling points on slippery slopes work. A Schelling point gets a large part of its power from its uniqueness, "If not here where?" This has the disadvantage that if it is nevertheless breached, you'll slip much further down the slope.

It seems like a case of a binary commitment. Breaking the commitment at all gives you -20 hedons, but breaking it even more only gives you -1 hedons per break or whatever (which is outweighed by the gains from breaking it more). I think most internal commitments are set up this way because it's easier to make a commitment like this explicit and enforceable than one that's more continuous over actions.

I've heard people talk about "Success Chains" - do something every day, and eventually you get a chain of successful days, and this helps pressure you to keep having successful days. Since this is generally a binary metric, it's better to have a single catastrophic failure than numerous smaller ones - it reduces the number of "breaks" in the chain and thus keeps that momentum going.

In other words, if I failed my diet a bit, I might as well fail it severely - then my body will have tons of food, and it'll be easier to get "back on track" the next few days.

Essentially, if your consequences don't scale correctly, then you want to cluster your failures. If you get written up for being late to work whether it's 15 minutes of 4 hours, you'd rather have one day where EVERYTHING goes wrong and you're 4 hours late, rather than a week where you show up 15 minutes late. Since humans are horrible at scale, it's not surprising that even our internal consequences of guilt and such don't scale linearly to the size of the transgression.

In the drug addiction literature this is called Abstinence Violation Effect. I'll write a full comment about it when I have some time.

You're exploiting your own scope neglect bias: You know you'll regret what happened at that event, but you also kind of know that you'll regret it a similar amount, whether you eat that additional cookie or you whether you don't.

Moreover, eating that additional cookie lessens the weight assigned to the first transgression (e.g. the pizza), because now instead of a singular event it's merely one in a series of events, and thinking about the whole series, there's less individual regret based on that first pizza incident.

It comes down to trying to game your own reward/punishment system, acting as if that surrogate parameter is the actual goal (instead of the weight loss).

Puny hu-mans!

Now that I think about that, that feels a lot like refusing a small offer in a game of Ultimatum again my past self.

One way to look at the what-the-hell pattern is as perfectionism. I set up a rule for myself, and if I fail to follow it even a little bit, then I might as well fail to follow it entirely: the only categories are "following the rule" and "not following the rule".

For instance, I may resolve to exercise every day. Skipping a day for any reason is a very strong predictor of also skipping the next day. "Exercising sometimes" feels, psychologically, like not following a rule about exercising, rather than like following a weaker rule or following it 80% of the time. (If I set up a rule to exercise 80% of the time, then I'll behave the same way with regard to that new rule, instead.)

There's probably research and information on dealing with perfectionism, but I don't know what it is.

There is an obvious model of this, I call it the "can of worms" model. When something is contained under pressure and the container cracks, odds are that more than a single worm will get out, and it is much harder to put the worms back in than to keep them in. This model describes some very diverse phenomena, like nuclear fission, glass breaking, contested divorce, social revolution, etc. That said, I am not sure how applying this model can help one avoid this pitfall.

It's not clear to me that this should be analyzed as a cognitive bias. It seems to be primarily a social phenomenon, and seems pretty reasonable if you operate in a social environment where small and large transgressions of rules are punished equally severely. I wouldn't be surprised to see it disappear in a social environment where people didn't use binary social rules but awarded points based on how well you adhered to rules.

Am I the only one to whom this just looks like a minor transformation of Sunk Cost Fallacy?

I often find it useful to focus my attention on what effects my actions have on the margin. For example, sometimes I randomly go running because I figure the marginal effects on my longevity and energy levels will outweigh the discomfort from running, and I see them as benefits that I can pluck for myself. (If I could quantify energy levels/longevity, the numbers would be going in the right direction.) Or sometimes I'm really tired and I don't have the energy to figure out what's optimal and work on it, so I just work on some random useful thing I can do, secure in the knowledge that if I was to zoom out and look at the bigger picture, I would agree that I was purchasing utility by working on it.

I think it is related to this effect. It's like there's something like ‘mental inertia’, so to speak.