Follow the causal chain from top to bottom.
This page shows that we have evolved with tendencies that encourage us to stay in bad relationships longer than we should.
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Explanation (based on an excerpt from the book)
Why we stay in bad relationships
10.3.2.1. Dwelling on the Past [Why We Cannot Ignore Sunk Costs]
Business managers will tell us that the decision about whether or not to proceed with a project should only depend on what it means for the future, not on how much we have invested in it up to that point. Imagine we have just built a huge factory at great expense; if the factory is not going to make money for us going forward, it should be abandoned; the past expenses are “sunk costs” and should be ignored. We might be able to do this in business, but in our personal life, we find it very hard. If we have spent five years in a relationship, we do not want those five years to be wasted, even though staying with the person may mean that the next five years will be miserable too. We are always tempted to give them one more chance . The reluctance to walk away from something that we have invested heavily in comes less from the feeling of waste, and more from the desire to avoid admitting to ourselves that we were stupid to have been involved in the first place. Our inability to ignore sunk costs is thus another aspect of the mask of competence that we try so desperately to protect, of the personal narrative that we work to make favorable.We are driven to behave Consistently, and when we do not do so we are punished by an unpleasant feeling of cognitive dissonance, telling us that something that we have done is in conflict with who we are. We can also get a similar unpleasant twinge when we do something different from the herd.
We do not act based on the world around us, we act based on our internal model of the world around us, built by our senses and a whole load of rules and assumptions. This internal model may not match the world well in some situations.
Evolution only had our senses to work with. It is through these poor conduits that the massive amount of information in the world gets filtered. We have to sort and structure that fragmentary data into a model that tells us that, for example, the tree that is now behind us is still there, even though we can no longer see it. If we had no model we would only be able to interact with things if we were looking straight at them.
We have an urge to behave consistently, to act in predictable ways based on our previous behavior
Our tribes function better if the members behave consistently, so that we all know what everyone else is likely to do in a given situation, so we have developed a preference for consistency in others, and in ourselves. This is supported by our desire to have a strong mask (not one that is fluid and mutable). This need for consistency is wired into us at a deep, instinctive level.
We try hard not to let our status slip, as we perceive it (e.g. by conforming to society’s rules)
Not losing status is absolutely vital (we could lose the opportunity to mate altogether). We avoid any activities that could reduce our status.
We rationalize after the fact.
Rationalization is the process by which we try to change our perception of the world to externalize failure and to internalize success (nullifying insecurity threats). An aspect of our rationalizing is that we pretend that our conscious minds are in control, when actually they just tell us a story about our actions, the actions that have really been guided by our subconscious reflex circuits.