Yes, that's the actual term for it. In behavioral psychology, the what-the-hell effect describes what happens when you slip up on a goal, and instead of correcting course, you just give up entirely. You figure, "Well, I already messed up... what the hell, I might as well go all in."

It's common in dieting. You're trying to eat clean, but the wife orders pizza. You weren't planning to eat any, but you grab a slice. Then your brain says, "Well, I already blew it. Might as well have six slices, and maybe a donut, and maybe ice cream for dessert, too."

Same thing with working out. You miss a day at the gym, and instead of just picking back up tomorrow, you say, "Well, this week's already ruined. I'll restart next week. Or next month. Or maybe after the holidays."

It's similar to the Sunk Cost Fallacy in that you're continuing in the wrong direction, but the logic is reversed. With sunk cost, you keep going because you've invested too much already. With the what-the-hell effect, you keep going because you already broke the rules, so who cares anymore?

I've been guilty of this one. For years, I never commented my VBA code. Nothing. Not one. I figured, well, I've already written thousands of lines without comments and everything works fine, so what's the point of starting now? What the hell. Spoiler: future me was not amused.

I also used to never name my buttons properly. I figured why bother? Then Alex yelled at me. Now I name my buttons out of fear. :)

Here's another common one. Someone says, "I've never backed up my data, and I've never had a hard drive crash, so why should I start now?" Then one day, the drive fails. They lose everything. What the hell indeed.

A perfect Star Trek example of the what-the-hell effect comes from The First Duty. Wesley Crusher and his fellow cadets are involved in a training accident at Starfleet Academy that results in the death of a classmate. Instead of coming clean, they double down on a lie to cover up the maneuver that caused the crash. It starts as a single bad decision, but because they already crossed the line, they feel like they have to keep going with it. The cover-up becomes bigger than the incident itself. It's a classic what-the-hell spiral: one rule broken, so now all bets are off. Wesley eventually does the right thing, but not before the damage is done.*

You see the same effect in real life, too. Take the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal. The affair itself, while a personal and political mistake, probably wouldn't have led to impeachment on its own. But once he chose to lie about it under oath, everything escalated. That's the what-the-hell effect in action: "Well, I already messed up, might as well cover it up." The cover-up ended up being far worse than the original offense, and it all stemmed from that one decision to keep digging after the hole was already too deep.

You can actually see both of these fallacies play out at the poker table. The sunk cost fallacy shows up when a player has already dumped a bunch of chips into the pot and says, "Well, I've come this far, I can't fold now." But of course, the amount you've already bet shouldn't matter. The smart move is based on the odds and the situation in front of you, not what you've already put in. Still, that emotional investment can make it hard to walk away from a losing hand.

The what-the-hell effect is more emotional. A player makes a bad call or gets caught bluffing, and instead of resetting and playing smart, they spiral. "I already blew my stack, what the hell... might as well go all in with this 2/7 offsuit garbage and hope for the best." It's the poker version of eating the whole pizza because you already had one slice. One bad decision turns into several, not because it's smart, but because pride and frustration take the wheel.

Yeah, I used to play a little poker back in the day. I've never been much of a gambler, but I love hold'em poker.

The what-the-hell effect is a trap. One slip doesn't mean you've failed. It means you're human. The best thing you can do is stop the spiral. One slice of pizza doesn't ruin your week. One missed workout doesn't erase your gains. One uncommented module doesn't mean you should abandon documentation forever. Don't turn a bump in the road into a ditch. Pause, reset, and move forward. No "what the hell" required.

LLAP  
RR  

* And is it just me, or does that cadet squad leader look familiar? Locarno was his name in the episode. He looks suspiciously like Tom Paris. LOL. And yes, I know - it's the same actor. For a while, I actually thought maybe Voyager just retconned him. Like maybe Locarno used a fake name at the Academy so nobody would know his dad was an admiral. Sounds plausible, right? But nope. Turns out, it was a money thing. If the Voyager writers had used the actual Locarno character, then the writers of that TNG episode would have gotten paid royalties for every single Voyager episode Paris was in (so... all of them). And apparently Paramount wasn't into sharing. So they hit Ctrl+F, replaced "Locarno" with "Paris," adjusted the attitude slider slightly, and bam - new character, same haircut.