Scientists reveal a widespread but unidentified psychological phenomenon

Summary

Many people will continue with a longer, less efficient path to a goal rather than backtrack and take a shortcut — even when the backtracking would save time and effort. A new series of studies published in Psychological Science reveals that this behavior, called “doubling-back aversion,” emerges in both physical and mental tasks, and is driven not by mistaken cost estimates but by how people think about their past and future effort.Psychologists have long studied why people stick with inefficient paths. The status quo bias describes the tendency to prefer current arrangements, while the sunk-cost fallacy highlights how people keep investing in failing efforts to justify past choices. But these don’t quite explain situations where people are choosing among equally new options — except that one feels like it erases what’s already been done.Two researchers at UC Berkeley — Kristine Y. Cho, a PhD student, and Clayton R. Critcher, the Joe Shoong Professor of Business — sought to investigate whether people really do avoid doubling back, even when it’s objectively better, and to identify why.“We both had a strong intuition that we kept circling back to as we developed our research,” Cho explained. “The idea was this: Imagine you’re walking from your house to a friend’s place. You leave your front door, turn left, and head down the block. But then you realize that you would get there faster if you had gone right instead.”“At this point, you’re still close enough to home that retracing your steps, passing your front door, and taking the better route would actually save time. But would most people actually turn around and walk past where they started? We didn’t think so. That reluctance to reverse course, even when it’s clearly better, seemed to pop up a lot in real life. So we set out to investigate it.”Across four experiments involving more than 2,500 adults from the United States, researchers tested whether people avoided more efficient strategies if they involved retraci...