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 retracing their steps or restarting a task. The studies used both virtual navigation and cognitive tasks to examine the phenomenon in different contexts.
In the first study, college students used a virtual reality interface to move from one location to another. After walking a short distance, they encountered a map offering two paths to the destination. One path was shorter but required them to double back — literally reversing the steps they had just taken. Even though the shorter route would get them there faster, many avoided it when it required backtracking.
Subsequent studies replaced physical movement with mental effort. In one task, participants had to generate 40 words starting with the letter “G.” After listing 10, they were given a choice: continue with “G” words or switch to “T” words — a task expected to be easier. The tasks were objectively equivalent except for one difference: in one version, the new task was described as “starting over” and discarding previous work, while in the other version, it was described as “continuing the task under new instructions.” Both versions involved writing 30 more words, but only the “start over” version framed the switch as undoing progress.
In a third experiment, the researchers split doubling back into two components: deleting past work and having to complete the entire task from the beginning again. They manipulated how each component was framed and assessed how participants responded. The final study added a more detailed set of questions to examine how participants viewed their past and future efforts depending on their decision to switch tasks or stay the course.
Across all four studies, people consistently avoided options that involved doubling back, even when those options saved time. In the virtual reality study, only 31% of participants chose the shorter path when it required retracing their steps, compared to nearly 57% when it did not. In the word-generation tasks, framing the switch as “starting over” reduced the likelihood of switching from 75% to just 25%.
“The sheer size of the effect caught us off guard,” Cho told PsyPost. “For instance, take Study 2 in our paper. In that study, we told participants that they would have to list 40 words starting with the letter ‘G.’ But after they listed 10 words starting with ‘G’, we gave them the option to switch to listing words starting with the letter ‘T’. Because more words in the English language start with ‘T’ than ‘G’, switching essentially made the task easier. And when the choice was framed simply as a choice to switch letters for the remainder of the task, 75% of participants did indeed choose to switch to the easier task.”
“But when the choice was framed as ‘doubling back,’ that is, discarding their progress and starting over on a new task with 30 new ‘T’ words, only 25% switched. The contrast was so stark that my first reaction was to suspect a coding error, that maybe we had accidentally reversed the responses. But after carefully checking the data multiple times, we confirmed it was correct. The effect wasn’t just real, it was strikingly strong.”
Importantly, this aversion was not explained by a belief that the backtracking route would take longer. Participants generally understood that switching would save time. But they still chose to stay the course when switching was described as discarding previous work or restarting the task.
The researchers found that doubling-back aversion was driven by how people mentally interpreted their efforts. When switching tasks was framed as undoing work, participants felt that their earlier effort had been wasted. This made the remaining work feel less like a path to success and more like an uphill slog. The effect was stronger when participants believed they had to start from scratch rather than continue with a portion of the work.
The aversion was strongest when both components of doubling back were present — undoing past work and starting over with a full task. But each factor independently contributed to the effect. In other words, people were less likely to switch to a faster strategy even if only one part of doubling back was invoked.
The researchers also tested whether participants’ decisions were shaped by how much time they thought each path would take. Although people generally did think switching would be quicker, these perceptions didn’t fully explain their choices. Instead, people were more influenced by subjective impressions about what switching meant for their progress and future effort.
“Our research shows that people often avoid backtracking, even when changing course would clearly get them to their goal faster,” Cho explained. “This hesitation stems from a discomfort with ‘wasting’ past effort, but in reality, refusing to double back often leads to even more wasted time and energy. Our key takeaway is this: Progress isn’t always about pushing forward. Sometimes, the smartest move is to step back, reassess, and choose the better path, even if it means undoing what’s already been done.”
While the experiments captured doubling-back aversion in controlled settings, real-life decisions are often messier. Future research might explore how this bias plays out in more complex or emotionally charged scenarios — such as changing careers, relationships, or long-term projects.
“We examined doubling back aversion in the context of tasks that take just a few minutes to complete,” Cho noted. “But we expect that if anything, for more complex and longer tasks, doubling back aversion might be even stronger as people might become even more averse to viewing their longer past efforts as a waste.”
The studies also did not test ways to reduce doubling-back aversion. However, the researchers suggested that encouraging people to focus on future gains rather than past losses could help. For example, reframing a switch as a time-saving opportunity rather than a “restart” may reduce resistance.
This focus on how people mentally frame past effort and future potential has also shaped the researchers’ broader work. As Cho explained: “In our work on doubling-back aversion, we explored how people resist switching tactics midway, even when doing so would help them reach their goals more efficiently. More recently, we’ve been examining a related form of hesitation. This time, it’s not in switching paths, but in committing to one at all.”
“While it might seem that having enticing options (e.g., a great apartment one could rent, a fun event one could sign up for) would make commitment easier, we’ve found that it’s often the loss of a great option that finally pushes people to choose. People often hold out for something even better, but the disappearance of a pretty good option inspires some pessimism that encourages people to grab onto what is as good as they can get for now.”
“A theme that this suggests is that people are too past focused, worrying about feeling that they have made good use of their time and efforts,” Cho added. “But people need to recognize that the past is fixed, and it is only the future we can control. We need to be willing to accept that we may have made some mistakes along the way, but that is never too late to change course, especially when doing so will get us to where we want to go more quickly.”
The study, “Doubling-Back Aversion: A Reluctance to Make Progress by Undoing It,” was published May 9, 2025.
