Truly EXCELLENT article on Trump and his supporters

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Jaime Ducharme of Time magazine has summarized this dynamic:

If you’ve ever let unworn clothes clutter your closet just because they were expensive, or followed through on plans you were dreading because you already bought tickets, you’re familiar with the sunk cost fallacy.

“The sunk cost effect is the general tendency for people to continue an endeavor, or continue consuming or pursuing an option, if they’ve invested time or money or some resource in it,” says Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the author of a new paper on the topic published in the journal Psychological Science. “That effect becomes a fallacy if it’s pushing you to do things that are making you unhappy or worse off.”

This idea often applies to money, but invested time, energy or pain can also influence behavior. “Romantic relationships are a classic one,” Olivola says. “The longer you’ve been together, the harder it is to break up.”

The financial website The Street describes the sunk cost fallacy this way, writing that it "can affect even the smallest financial decision":

Let's return to the concert ticket example. Maybe you bought the ticket long in advance but realized too late that you have an exam the next morning, and need to spend that night studying and getting your rest. But $30 is a lot of money for a broke college student like yourself, so you decide to get your money's worth and attend the concert anyway.

That is the sunk cost fallacy at work. Regardless of whether you go to the concert or not, the $30 isn't getting recouped. It doesn't actually play a role in your decision.

This fallacy can play out in business often. If market research for a film suggests it won't be too popular or have that wide an audience, the studio might pour even more money into advertising in an attempt to raise awareness of it and avoid losses. What it's likely to do, though, is create even more losses.

In many respects, Donald Trump is the sunk cost president.

Trump also presented himself as a prophet or savior for white America, and has made many false promises along the way. But religions or cults are remarkably adept at surviving such failures. The classic research study "When Prophecy Fails" examines a cult whose leader told his followers that space aliens would arrive and take them off the planet at a future date, which of course never happened. Authors Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter explained all this in 1956:

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

But man's resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.