I do not know about scientific studies (which does not mean much), but at least anecdotally I think the answer is a yes at least for people who are not trained/experienced in making exactly these kinds of decisions.
One thing I have heard anecdotally is that people often significantly increase the prize when deciding to build/buy a house/car/vacation because they “are already spending lots of money, so who cares about adding 1% to the prize here and there to get neat extras” and thus spend years/months/days of income on things which they would not have bought if they had treated this as a separate decision. This is a bit different from the bird-charity example, but it seems very related to me in that our intuitions have trouble with keeping track of absolute size.
I do not know about scientific studies (which does not mean much), but at least anecdotally I think the answer is a yes at least for people who are not trained/experienced in making exactly these kinds of decisions.
One thing I have heard anecdotally is that people often significantly increase the prize when deciding to build/buy a house/car/vacation because they “are already spending lots of money, so who cares about adding 1% to the prize here and there to get neat extras” and thus spend years/months/days of income on things which they would not have bought if they had treated this as a separate decision.
This is a bit different from the bird-charity example, but it seems very related to me in that our intuitions have trouble with keeping track of absolute size.