Staying, leaving: the investment model
Satisfaction is not enough to explain why people stay. A model published in 1980 adds two factors, and accounts for situations common sense judges irrational.
A badly put question
People readily explain staying in a relationship by the satisfaction they draw from it: you stay because you are well. Observation contradicts that explanation, since dissatisfied people stay a long time and satisfied people leave.
The American psychologist Caryl Rusbult proposed in 1980 a model that accounts for this gap, by distinguishing satisfaction from commitment, and by adding two factors to the first.
Three factors
The first is satisfaction, that is, the gap between what the relationship brings and what was expected. The second is the quality of perceived alternatives: what one believes one could obtain elsewhere, including solitude, which is an alternative in its own right.
The third is investment: everything committed that would be lost by leaving: time, shared possessions, relationships built with the other's circle, plans. This factor operates independently of the first two, and it is the model's main contribution.
What the model explains
It accounts for situations common sense judges incoherent. A person with little satisfaction but heavy investment, who perceives few alternatives, stays; a satisfied but lightly invested person, with numerous alternatives, leaves. Commitment is not satisfaction.
It also throws light on why periods of transition (a move, a change of circle, separation from a shared milieu) are often accompanied by break-ups: they alter at a stroke the perceived alternatives and the value of the investment.
The proximity to sunk costs
The investment factor recalls a bias known in economics, that of sunk costs: one pursues a commitment because resources have already been devoted to it, when those resources are lost whatever happens and should not weigh in the decision.
The parallel has its limits. In a relationship, part of the investment is not lost in the event of a break-up, and what has been built may have a value in itself. The model describes a mechanism; it does not say that staying would be an error of reasoning.
The use that can be made of it
The model is descriptive, it prescribes nothing. What it allows is to distinguish three reasons for staying that the word staying conflates: because it is good, because one sees nothing better, or because one has committed too much.
All three reasons are legitimate, and they do not call for the same conclusions. Knowing which weighs most, at a given moment, is information few people give themselves.
Key points
Rusbult's model, published in 1980, distinguishes commitment from satisfaction and adds perceived alternatives and investment.
A person with little satisfaction but heavy investment and few alternatives stays: that is not an incoherence.
The model describes three reasons for staying that everyday language conflates, without saying which would be the right one.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
Start my test