Escalating situations resemble gambling. Though a gambler might play dozens of spins of the wheel at the roulette table in an evening, after the initial decision to play at all, subsequent bets are not genuine decisions, merely a continuation of that first commitment. Dostoevsky described this moment before the plunge in The Gambler:

I confess that my heart was pounding in my breast and that I didn’t feel at all cool and detached; probably I had felt for a long time already that I would leave Roulettenberg a different man and that something was about to happen which would radically and irrevocably change my life. I felt that it was bound to happen.

One can see in another Dostoevsky passage what Janis called overestimation:

I believe I had something like four thousand gulden in my hands within five minutes. That’s when I should have quit. But a funny feeling came over me, some sort of desire to challenge Fate, an uncontrollable urge to stick my tongue out at it, to give it a flip on the nose.

Note the “funny feeling” Dostoevsky’s gambler gets. Here literature points to a facet of escalation some researchers miss—there exists something in the emotion-action-results process of persistent gambling which feeds a hunger beyond material success or failure. The gambler, confronted with losing at the wheel, dice, horses, cards, etc., confronts reality’s mismatch to his or her intense feelings of confidence. He or she attempts to regain both the confident feeling of precognition and external success by increasing his or her betting. The gambler continues until all is lost.