Autocatalytic thoughts about quitting predicts actual decisions to quit during endurance running

Quitting involves being forced to stop despite wanting to continue. In laboratory tasks, quitting is often conflated with stopping decisions. They are modeled as optimal threshold-setting that balances expected reward and cost on the task. In real-world contexts, these types of decisions are known to be dependent on psychological factors besides utilitarian ones. In this work, an observational study was conducted where endurance runners self-reported incidences of thoughts of stopping a run as and when they experienced them. The runners were instructed to report the time for each stopping thought while engaged in a running session and could decide to stop running whenever they wanted to. The endurance experience for each runner was controlled by a constant running pace measured from their subjective endurance levels. Psychological variables were measured using scales for personality traits (NEO-FFI), procrastination (Pure Procrastination Scale) and impulsiveness (Barrett Scale). Participants who quit their runs ahead of when they had wanted to stop displayed a distinctive cascading pattern of stopping thoughts, represented by two dimensions on a t-SNE space. An exponential rate model estimated each runner’s probability of quitting based on two parameters, rate of stopping thoughts and the growth rate of the decision variable. The rate parameter showed negative associations with procrastination and anxiety factors and positive association with the conscientiousness factor. A single t-SNE dimension loaded positively onto the rate parameter suggesting the influence of stopping thoughts on a subject’s quitting propensity. These results suggest that stopping thoughts bias the decision process towards quitting and need to be incorporated into models of stopping and quitting, for greater phenomenological discriminability.