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Doubling-Back Aversion: A Reluctance to Make Progress by Undoing It.

Kristine Y Cho¹, Clayton R Critcher¹

¹Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

Psychological Science

|May 9, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

People avoid more efficient paths if they require undoing progress, a bias called doubling-back aversion. This reluctance stems from viewing past efforts as wasted, not route efficiency.

Keywords:

decision-making goal pursuit judgment subjective construal sunk-cost fallacy waste aversion

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Behavioral Economics
Decision Science

Background:

Individuals often face choices where a more efficient path requires retracing steps or discarding prior work.
Understanding the psychological drivers behind such decisions is crucial for explaining seemingly suboptimal choices.

Purpose of the Study:

To identify and define the phenomenon of 'doubling-back aversion.'
To investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying this aversion.
To differentiate doubling-back aversion from related concepts like the sunk-cost fallacy.

Main Methods:

Four studies involving 2,524 U.S. adults were conducted.
Participants engaged in virtual-reality navigation and performance tasks.
Doubling back was analyzed by its components: progress deletion and task completion proportion.

Main Results:

A consistent 'doubling-back aversion' was observed across diverse tasks.
Both deletion of past progress and increase in remaining task proportion independently contributed to this aversion.
The aversion was explained by subjective construals of past/future effort, not route length perception.

Conclusions:

Doubling-back aversion is a distinct psychological bias where individuals avoid efficient paths that necessitate undoing progress.
The primary driver is the aversion to perceiving past efforts as wasted.
This finding offers a new perspective on decision-making under conditions of progress and potential reversal.