That's probably right at higher kyu levels, when you really have no good grasp of group status.
When you ask a novice "what is the status of this group", though, there is typically a time when they can correctly answer "dead" in exercise settings, but fail to draw the appropriate conclusion in a game by cutting their losses, and that's where I want to draw a parallel with the sunk cost fallacy.
This is similar to life situations where if you'd just ask yourself the question "is this a sunk cost, and should I abandon it" you'd answer yes in the abstract, but you fail to ask that question.
In high-pressure or blitz games this even happens to higher level novice players - you strongly suspect the group is dead, but you keep adding stones to it, playing the situation out: the underlying reasoning is that your opponent has to respond to any move that might save the group, so you're no worse off, you've played one more move and they've played one more.
This is in fact wrong - by making the situation more settled you're in fact wasting the potential to use these plays later as ko threats.
Any idea whether Go beginners' tendency to "throw good stones after bad" results from sunk cost fallacy in particular, or from wishful thinking in general?
Like, is the thought "I don't want my stones to have been wasted" or "I really want to have that corner of the board"?
I just finished the first draft of my essay, "Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?"; there is still material I need to go through, but the bulk of the material is now there. The formatting is too gnarly to post here, so I ask everyone's forgiveness in clicking through.
To summarize:
(If any of that seems unlikely or absurd to you, click through. I've worked very hard to provide multiple citations where possible, and fulltext for practically everything.)
I started this a while ago; but Luke/SIAI paid for much of the work, and that motivation plus academic library access made this essay more comprehensive than it would have been and finished months in advance.