Peter Ayton
Peter Ayton is a decision researcher and the co-author, with Hal Arkes, of the 1999 review in Psychological Bulletin that asked whether humans are less rational than other animals when it comes to money and effort already spent. Two findings in it cut against the simple story. The review found no unambiguous case of the Concorde fallacy in animals, and it found young children behaving more sensibly than adults in a comparable situation.
Who they are
The vault carries no confirmed current post for him, and none is claimed here.
The Concorde fallacy is the name biologists gave to carrying on with something because of what has already been invested in it, after the aircraft that kept being funded on the grounds that it was half built. Economists call the same error the sunk cost fallacy.
Key papers
Arkes, H. R., & Ayton, P. (1999). "The sunk cost and Concorde effects: are humans less rational than lower animals?", Psychological Bulletin, 125(5), 591 to 600. Second author. Abstract read. No unambiguous instances of the error in animals, and young children less prone to it than adults.
Key ideas
The awkward conclusion is the useful one. If animals do not do this and small children do it less, the error is unlikely to be a deep feature of how brains value things. Arkes and Ayton's proposal is that it is a side effect of learning a rule about not being wasteful, and then applying that rule with more enthusiasm than accuracy.
The two halves of the review have aged differently. The developmental half, about children, has survived the later argument well. The animal half has since been revisited from both directions, by Brian Sweis and colleagues in 2018 and by a 2021 paper questioning the design of the tasks involved.
It is worth stating because most popular accounts present this error as a universal, primitive bias, and the strongest comparative evidence available in 1999 pointed the other way.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Arkes, H. R., & Ayton, P. (1999). Psychological Bulletin, 125(5), 591 to 600.
- The later argument over the animal evidence is set out on the Concorde fallacy page. No current affiliation verified in this pass.