Imagine you’re hiking a mountain trail and realize halfway through that you missed a quicker, more straightforward path to the summit—one that would get you there faster but requires turning around and retracing your steps.
Logically, it’s the smart move to go back and restart along the quicker path. However, something inside you resists. You keep trudging forward on the longer route, simply because it feels wrong to go backward.
According to a new study, that gut feeling is a previously unidentified, but widespread, psychological phenomenon researchers are calling “doubling-back aversion.”
In a series of experiments involving more than 2,500 participants, University of California, Berkeley researchers, Kristine Y. Cho and Clayton R. Critcher, found that people consistently reject more efficient paths to a goal if those routes require undoing some of the progress they’ve already made.
Whether navigating virtual landscapes or completing cognitive tasks, participants were less willing to “double back,” even when doing so saved time and effort. The findings, published in Psychological Science, help explain a common but irrational decision-making bias—and why we often choose persistence over progress.
“Four studies…provide support for doubling-back aversion, a reluctance to pursue more efficient means to a goal when they entail undoing progress already made,” the researchers explain in the study. “Participants’ aversion to feeling their past efforts were a waste encouraged them to pursue less efficient means.”
The study introduces a deceptively simple yet powerful concept: people are psychologically uncomfortable with the idea of reversing their progress, even when it leads to a better outcome.
Researchers define this as “doubling-back aversion,” which they differentiate from more familiar biases, such as the sunk-cost fallacy or status quo bias. While those phenomena explain why people stick with poor decisions due to past investments or reluctance to change, doubling-back aversion stems specifically from the emotional discomfort of erasing visible progress.
In one experiment, participants navigated a virtual trail between two points. Halfway through the journey, they were presented with two options: continue forward on a longer route, or double back and take a shorter one. Despite being told that the backward path would save time, more than half chose to stay on the longer route when it meant they wouldn’t have to retrace their steps.
In another task, participants were asked to generate 40 words beginning with the letter “G.” After producing the first ten, they were given the option to switch and complete the task with 30 “T” words—an objectively easier choice, since there are more “T“ words in the English language.
However, when this change was framed as “throwing out the work you have done so far and starting over,“ only 25.5% opted to switch. When the exact same choice was presented as simply “continuing with the remaining 75%“ of the task, 75.4% chose the easier path.
This dramatic difference was consistent across four separate studies, all designed to tease out the underlying factors. The researchers discovered that two elements are compelling in producing this aversion: the deletion of previous work and the perception that the remaining effort constitutes a brand-new task rather than a continuation.
In essence, it’s not just about going back. It’s about what that backtracking symbolizes. People tend to view their past efforts as wasted if they must undo them, and they psychologically “reset“ their mental timeline, making the remaining work feel more daunting.
Study 3 specifically broke down these two components—deletion and task framing—showing that each contributes independently to doubling-back aversion. When participants were told that switching would “delete“ their previous work, only 38.8% switched to the faster task. However, when the same switch was described as “preserving“ past work, 65.5% made the change. Similarly, if the task ahead were framed as starting an entirely new job, only 46% would switch. If it was described as simply completing the last 75%, 60.3% did.
Significantly, participants were not making these decisions because they misjudged the time required. Across the board, they correctly perceived that switching would save effort and complete the task faster. However, emotional interpretations of the situation—feeling like one was “starting over“ or discarding progress—overpowered their logical cost-benefit calculations.
“Being led to see switching as undoing one’s work and having to complete an entirely new task made people feel that switching would contaminate the work that they had already done and feel down about the work they had left to do,“ researchers noted.
These findings have profound implications, from daily productivity to high-stakes professional and organizational decisions. In fields like project management, software development, or strategic planning, decision-makers often resist abandoning a partially completed path—even when new evidence or opportunities suggest a better alternative. Understanding this psychological phenomenon can lead to more effective decision-making.
The emotional weight of “wasting“ past work becomes a mental roadblock, encouraging people to forge ahead down inefficient routes.
Researchers were careful to distinguish doubling-back aversion from the sunk-cost fallacy. While the sunk-cost bias hinges on financial or resource investments that have already been made, doubling-back aversion can emerge even when no meaningful cost has been incurred—just the perception of erasing effort.
For instance, in the virtual reality study, participants had invested only a minute or two before encountering the map that offered a faster return route. Nevertheless, they overwhelmingly preferred not to “erase“ their movement, even though doing so had no tangible cost. This can be compared to situations in daily life, such as when we resist changing our route to work even if it’s faster, simply because it feels like we’re undoing our previous choice.
“In one instantiation, the sunk-cost fallacy can dissuade people from completing a goal (e.g., attending a show) if their initial investment failed to yield a return (e.g., a purchased ticket was lost,“ researchers explain. “With doubling-back aversion, the question is not whether people complete a goal but rather what may discourage them from doing so efficiently.“
Doubling-back aversion is also distinct from status quo bias, which broadly captures the human tendency to stick with familiar paths. In contrast, doubling-back aversion explains a specific form of irrational resistance that arises not from fear of change but from how progress is mentally represented.
The study’s meticulous design—encompassing preregistered methods, publicly available data, and computational reproducibility—provides robust support for this previously unidentified psychological phenomenon.
In moments when the most effective path forward seems to require taking a step back—revising an outline, scrapping a half-written draft, restarting a project, or pivoting in a new direction—these recent findings suggest we’re psychologically wired to resist. Recognizing this reflex can be the first step toward making more intelligent and flexible decisions.
The researchers hope the insights can help people reframe their understanding of effort, progress, and success. Ultimately, as the study shows, it’s not the actual time or energy that makes a task feel longer or harder—it’s how we interpret the journey.
“Doubling-back aversion results from shifts in people’s subjective understanding of what changing course would mean, independent of perceptions of how objectively daunting each route was,“ researchers conclude.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com