Inability to close doors

What it is

Keeping options open at a high cost in time, attention and money, even when they are nearly worthless.

Related

• Loss aversion bias
  Closing a door feels like a loss, even of an option we would never use.
• Paradox of choice bias
  Keeping more options open produces more choices to manage.
• Alternative blindness bias
  Both are about the cost of options: alternative blindness ignores the better options we forgo, inability to close doors keeps worthless ones open.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#68: The inability to close doors

References

• Wikipedia: Inability to close doors en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “Deciding and acting: incentives, loss and commitment”