Is There Always Escalation of Commitment?

Abstract

The Staw (1976) study and the Bazerman, et al. (1984) study showed that individuals responsible for negative consequences consistently escalated their commitment to the previously chosen course of action. The present study attempted to replicate the escalation of commitment phenomenon. Staw's experimental procedures for the condition of high responsibility and negative feedback were followed. The present sample consisted of 93 university students. Analysis showed that there was no escalation of commitment following negative feedback. There was a significant reduction in commitment following the initial allocations to the Industrial Products Division. Possible interpretations for the inconsistent findings were proposed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.