Framing heuristic, for purposes of clarity, can be described as a mental shortcut that enables people to make decisions within a specified time frame. It shortens the time required to make decisions and solve problems. Additionally, heuristics allow people to undertake different tasks quickly without stopping to think about other ways of completing the assignments. Liu et al. (2020) defined heuristic as a “phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment”. This is done despite evidence showing that such decisions yielded negative results.
Escalation of commitment is a type of framing heuristics with its origin in prospect theory. According to the theory, people are innately not efficient decision-makers–they make mistakes when trying to weigh benefits and costs associated with different alternatives. They often make errors due to biases, which stems from the possibility of incurring losses. Psychologists views this tendency as the sunk cost fallacy, where people end up having an emotional attachment to investment, thus, making it difficult to abandon it. Escalation of commitment can be defined as an individual’s belief system which compels them to pursue a particular course of action despite facing multiple negative outcomes associated with their decisions.
Framing heuristics contributes a lot to a manager’s escalation of commitment through the perceived need for self-justification. According to self-justification theory, “managers who invest scarce resources will be driven to persist in proving to themselves and significant others that their decision was correct”. In this regard, managers tend to disassociate themselves with the negative feedback linked to their behavior. The same has been demonstrated through denial and other related ego-defensive actions. For instance, some managers may choose to pay close attention to beneficial information and positive experience while avoiding negative feedback. More importantly, framing heuristics breeds overconfidence, which is the main determinant of project failure. The problem stems from the fact that managers tend to overestimate their abilities despite facing several negatives outcomes linked to their consolidated efforts.