The "what-the-hell" effect, when you break a rule and then go on a rule-breaking rampage, like binge eating after a single dietary transgression, is a very common failure mode. It was recently mentioned in the Overcoming Bias blog comments on the Which biases matter most? Let’s prioritise the worst! post. I have not been able to find an explicit discussion of this issue here, though there are quite a few comments on binge-<something>.
From the Psyblog entry quoting this paper:
Although everyone was given the same slice of pizza; when it was served up, for some participants it was made to look larger by comparison.
This made some people think they'd eaten more than they really had; although in reality they'd all eaten exactly the same amount. It's a clever manipulation and it means we can just see the effect of thinking you've eaten too much rather than actually having eaten too much.
When the cookies were weighed it turned out that those who were on a diet and thought they'd blown their limit ate more of the cookies than those who weren't on a diet. In fact over 50% more! [Emphasis mine]
Other examples include sliding back into one's old drinking/smoking/surfing habit. For example, that's how I stopped using Pomodoro.
My (title) question is, what's the mechanism of this cognitive failure and whether it can be reduced to a combination of existing biases/fallacies? If the latter is true, can addressing one of the components counteract the what-the-hell effect? If so, how would one go about testing it?
For completeness, the top hit from Google scholar to the "what-the-hell effect" query is chapter 5 of Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-regulation, by Martin and Tesser.
EDIT: personal anecdotes are encouraged, they may help construct a more complete picture.
Yeah, more or less. From my personal experience, it seems to require about the same amount of willpower to get either a string of small failures or a single big failure. I have no clue why this is, beyond the basic theory of "success chains" being good for motivating us - a single break doesn't seem to slow down motivation, but a lot of little ones tend to kill it.
Hmmm, given that some people look at this advice as "obvious" and others are utterly baffled by it, there's a chance that this advice only works for a certain segment of the population. It might help to model this as general advice, regardless of goal: I learned about it in terms of building career skills and fixing sleep schedules, and just naively started using it to build my diets on the assumption that it was a generic pattern (for me, at least, it's where all my semi-stable diets come from)