MLM recruitment supplies surrogate family, status, and meaning that cost cannot undo

Evidence

Sabine gets a surrogate family there, status, the hope of becoming rich, the belief that she is helping other people with the products, saving them, the feeling that she is doing good for herself and her body, and possibly even a surrogate religion. Why would she give that up? For what? And the more time, money and energy she has invested in it, the more unswervingly she tries to justify those costs (sunk cost fallacy). No one likes to admit they were wrong. It triggers painful feelings of shame. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 405

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the five-pillars model (para 401) as a unifying framework across cults, MLMs, and extreme ideologies.