The Cost of Efficiency: Exploring Doubling-Back Aversion

Why do we avoid retracing our steps—even when it helps us reach our goals faster? In this episode of Under the Cortex, host Özge Gürcanlı Fischer-Baum speaks with Kristine Cho and Clayton Critcher from the University of California, Berkeley about their latest research on doubling-back aversion: the tendency to resist more efficient paths if they require undoing prior effort. 

Across four studies involving performance tasks and virtual navigation, Kristine finds that people often choose less efficient strategies simply to avoid feeling like their past actions were a waste. This aversion, while related to the sunk-cost fallacy, has its own unique psychological fingerprint. 

Tune in to learn how our perceptions of effort, progress, and meaning can lead us astray—even when we know better. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at  [email protected].

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:09.260] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Have you ever stuck with an inefficient path just because it felt wrong to retrace your steps? This week, we explore a powerful new concept in decision making. Doubling back aversion, our reluctance to undo progress, even when doing so would help us reach our goals more efficiently. This is under the cortex I am Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. I’m joined by Kristine Cho and Clayton Critcher from the University of California, Berkeley. Through a series of clever experiments, their research team shows how people resist more optimal routes if it means deleting part of their past efforts, even when doubling back is the rational choice. They share their findings in APS’s flagship journal, Psychological Science. Kristine and Clayton, welcome to Under the Cortex. 

[00:01:02.880] – Clayton Critcher 

Thank you. 

[00:01:03.900] – Kristine Cho 

Thank you. 

[00:01:04.780] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Let me start with our classic first question, what type of psychologist are you and how did you get interested in the study of judgment and decision decision making. 

[00:01:17.540] – Kristine Cho 

I’m an experimental psychologist. I am currently a PhD candidate at UCD Berkeley. I remember back when I was an undergrad, I was taking intro to psych, and we had a two-class where we were still module on judgment and decision making. I remember being enamored by all of these heuristics, all of these deviations from rational choice. That’s how I got interested in judgment and decision making. 

[00:01:44.520] – Clayton Critcher 

I’m a social psychologist by training. I’m in the business school at UC Berkeley, where I do also consumer psychology. I did my PhD at Cornell with David Dunning. He’s now at the University of Michigan, Tom Gillevich, David Pizzarro, among a few others. I mentioned those three in particular because I knew I was most interested in how people navigate their everyday lives. I think of that as their social worlds, their economic worlds, their political worlds, and the moral sphere as well. Both Dave and Tom Gillevich, they’ve really built amazing careers and reputations out of using judgment, decision-making, JDM as a lens by which to think about rationality and irrationality of how people navigate really all facets of their lives. So JDM, in part because it so is influenced by economics, it really thinks about in what ways are people rational? In what ways are they irrational? And trying to explain why. And so it offers a really nice general lens for studying so many topics. And you’re going to hear about one of those from us today, doubling back aversion. 

[00:02:58.480] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, I’m very excited. Let’s do it right away. Your recent work introduces the concept of doubling back aversion. Can you define this for our listeners in everyday terms? 

[00:03:09.280] – Clayton Critcher 

Sure. Doubling back aversion is a preference that people seem to have and how they prefer to pursue a task or a goal. In the self-regulation and goals literature, psychologists often talk about means and end states. A goal is a motivation or an intention to get to an instate. That can be to lose 10 pounds, get an A in a class, land a six-figure income, or something a bit more concrete, like just trying to finish a draft of a paper. But with many goals, There’s a lot of different pathways or means by which you can actually get to that instate. You can try out different diet or exercise routines. You can seek out a professor during their office hours to try to improve your grades, pursue more education to get a better job. This is especially relevant, the fact that there are so many different means to arrive in an instate to defining doubling back aversion. Doubling back aversion is a reluctance after you’ve been pursuing one means to an instate to say, You know what? I’m going to actually step back, throw out the work that I’ve already done, and start over on a different pathway to try to reach that goal. 

[00:04:30.000] – Clayton Critcher 

People seem to be really reluctant to do that, even when in the end, that would be the most efficient way to reach an instate. A lot of our work both documents that phenomenon or that preference and tries to figure out why it occurs. 

[00:04:45.680] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, I am definitely interested in learning more about this because I have a 10-year-old who is very stubborn, and she definitely shows this type of behavior. Let me turn back to you. What inspired you to explore this phenomenon and beyond it being an interesting idea? Was there a specific moment or observation that sparked the idea? 

[00:05:08.640] – Kristine Cho 

We both had this anecdotal intuition, if you will, that we would often return to as we were designing our studies. Imagine you’re walking from your house to a friend’s place and you head out the front door, take a left, and go about a block. But then you realize that although you could keep going this way, It would actually have been faster to have left your home and started out going right instead of left. And at this point, you’re still close enough to home that it would still be faster to make a U-turn, go past your front door, and go on the route you should have taken to begin with. But would most people actually turn around and go past their front door? We didn’t really think so. Some might, sure, but we suspected that a lot of people wouldn’t. That presentation, that discomfort with undoing progress, was something we saw over and over again in everyday decisions, so we decided to study it. 

[00:06:11.660] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

There are other related concepts to similar behavior, right? You distinguish doubling back erosion from the sunk cost fallacy. How are these concepts related and what makes doubling back erosion unique? 

[00:06:25.580] – Clayton Critcher 

It’s funny that you ask that. I’m not usually the type of academic who talks a lot about my research with my non-academic or my non-psychologist friends, but I was actually hanging out a few days ago with a friend of mine who’s my age, I’m 41, who left a career in finance, went back to law school I bring that up to say this person has no background in psychology. Somehow I got to telling him about this paper. After a brief description, he asks me, How is that different from the Sunklauss fallacy? I was a bit in a way, and I think it speaks to what a good job that psychologists have done with disseminating our findings to the general public. I know podcasts like this one play a great role in that. So yes, it’s a popular question everyone is asking us. To be clear, the two phenomena are related. The Sunclaus Fallacy is premised on the idea that even though we pursue goals because we think that the benefit that will ultimately will outweigh the costs, it’s really hard to accept the costs that you incur along the way without also getting some benefit that you’re striving for. 

[00:07:39.760] – Clayton Critcher 

The problem comes up in that for some costs, there are only certain ones that you should actually be putting into your equation or your calculations. Those are the costs that you’re going to face in the future. Other costs are what we call sunk. How much you’ve already paid for a ticket to see a show or how many hours you’ve already waited for a delayed flight, you’re not going to get that money or that time back. The problem is that people don’t want to walk away from a goal when they’ve already incurred a lot of cost to get to where they are in the present. If you’re an investor, if you’ve already put a lot of money into a failing venture, the Sunk Loss Fallacy says that instead of walking away when you should and giving up on your goal of seeing that venture succeed, you might just to throw more and more money at that failing venture and only compound your losses in the process. Doubling back aversion shares a focus on people being unwilling to view their past efforts as a waste. But the question that’s different is it’s not whether someone should abandon their goal or their pursuit of an instate. 

[00:08:53.220] – Clayton Critcher 

Instead, it’s what means are you going to take to actually get there? In that sense, we think that doubling back aversion should be an easier bias to avoid because in the end, you’re still going to arrive at that prize or that instate you’ve been striving for. It’s just that people are so reluctant to switch to a more efficient pathway along the way. If doing so is going to temporarily undo or delete some of their progress. 

[00:09:22.860] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

What is the process of changing your strategy and why aren’t you doing it? And your Their experiments were very interesting. I definitely enjoyed reading about them. They spent virtual reality environments and more abstract tasks. Why was it important to test this idea across different in the context. 

[00:09:46.580] – Kristine Cho 

As you said in our paper, we ran four studies, and one involved navigating a virtual reality environment, and the other in three involved completing different performance tasks. Even Even though the virtual reality study appears first in the paper, it was actually the last one we connected. We started with the other studies because they gave us a way to run very clean experiments where every participant was technically faced with the same choices, but we could frame them in different ways, either as involving doubling back or not. For instance, in study two, we asked people to come up with 40 words starting with the same lighter, and everyone started with the letter G. But after generating 10 words, so a quarter of the way through, we gave them a choice. In the control condition, we told participants they could keep going or if they wanted, they could switch letters and do the rest of the task with the letter T. Since T is a more common starting letter than G, most people saw that as a helpful change, and consequently, about three quarters of them opted to switch. But for other participants, we found this option to switch as throwing out the work you have done thus far, so that’s deleting their work, and starting over with new instructions in which they would think of 30 words that would start with T, meaning they now have 100% of the task remaining, and suddenly, only one-fourth of participants wanted to switch to the new, somewhat better instructions. 

[00:11:24.920] – Kristine Cho 

The framing made a big difference. Even though the task itself didn’t change, presenting it as deleting one’s work and adding to how much of the task was remaining made people far less willing to take the more efficient option. Now, that being said, all of these studies involved more abstract or metaphorical forms of backtracking. We wanted to test the phenomenon in a way that was closer to the original intuition that we had that we explained previously. The everyday situation where you realize you’ve gone the wrong way and hesitate to turn around. It happens that we were very fortunate to have a research assistant who was great at VR programming. She built a really simple game that looked more like a transition between studies than an experiment. And so all participants had just finished a different study, which had been administered by a computer in our lab at Berkeley on an unrelated topic, and they felt that they needed to walk through a virtual reality world to get to the next study. So they started out by moving forward in what at first looks like the only way they can go until they arrive at a map. 

[00:12:43.360] – Kristine Cho 

And there they can see that there are actually two paths, a short path and a long path. But for some people, the short path literally requires doing a 180 and retracing their steps to reach a shortcut that they had not initially seen. I see that a majority of participants, about 57%, opted to take the longer path so as not to have to literally double back. This VR study doesn’t really dig into all the psychological mechanisms behind doubling and back aversion that we write about in our later studies. But in some ways, I think it captures the effect most clearly. 

[00:13:25.700] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Right. Let’s talk about those psychological processes. What role does our perception of progress or the loss of its play in our reluctance to double back. 

[00:13:34.740] – Clayton Critcher 

There’s an old adage that for every two steps we take forward, we often take one step back. At least when I hear people say that, they’re typically using that to discuss how progress is not linear, that even as we make progress toward long-term goals, we have what seems like inevitable setbacks or backlashes along the way. Our work is premise on the idea that for every two steps we take forward, we often should take one step back, that life is complicated and more complicated even than our experiments. And a good chunk of the time, we’re not on the best route for where we want to be going, but it’s so hard for us to see a step backward as progress. One psychologist with whom our work resonated, reached out to us to highlight how doubling back aversion is something he sees as impeding leading scientific progress that we all operate in this field in which we value theory building and grand theories are supposed to serve as an intellectually organizing principle that pushes for even more scientific progress. But sometimes we can ultimately make the most progress by abandoning some of our theories that have run their course and how much new progress they can motivate and understanding how actually taking a different route, trying to build things back from the bottom up, once again, can actually help us arrive at that final end state of a full understanding of human psychology most efficiently. 

[00:15:10.720] – Clayton Critcher 

It’s just so hard for us to think about progress in that way. 

[00:15:14.520] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I agree. I think when progress is not linear, we don’t necessarily like it. Let’s talk a little bit about subjective construals. You mentioned that this aversion is rooted in subjective construals of past and future effort. Could you explain what that means and why it matters? 

[00:15:35.380] – Kristine Cho 

When we set out to understand what’s actually driving doubling back aversion, we wanted to know, does doubling back seem to exaggerate costs in terms of time, or does it change the subjective interpretation or control of one’s efforts? To test that first idea that maybe doubling back feels longer or more time-consuming, we actually asked participants how long they thought it would take them to, for example, think of 30 more words that started with G or to think of 30 words that started with T. Interestingly, people were pretty realistic about it. They knew that switching to T would take less time since it’s easier to come up with T words. They didn’t think switching and starting over would actually make the task longer overall. The hesitation to double back wasn’t about the actual time involved. Instead, what really seemed to matter was how people felt about the effort they had already spent and what they saw ahead of them. When doubling back, they felt that the effort they had already put in was not successful progress, but just a waste. At the same time, the remaining work felt heavier, more like a burden than an opportunity to succeed. 

[00:16:57.140] – Kristine Cho 

In that way, doubling back didn’t just change the task ask, logistically, it changed the whole narrative of their progress. That shift in how they made sense of both past and future effort is what drove their reluctance. It wasn’t about the cost in time, it was about how people mentally frame their own effort. 

[00:17:18.460] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

It is about the narrative of the progress. I really like that. Let me turn to you then. Were you surprised by the findings that participants’ choices were How did that define your expectations? 

[00:17:32.220] – Clayton Critcher 

I think we were surprised less by the specific direction of the findings, and we were more surprised by the size or the magnitude of some of the findings. I remember the first study we ran, the one that Christine just described to everyone. That was about people thinking about words that start with the letter G, and then they had the option to switch to words that start with the letter T. For only some people, do we frame that exact same choice as requiring doubling back, throwing out your work and starting on a new task. I remember when Christine came to my office and showed me the results that 75% of people ordinarily wanted to switch to thinking of words that start with T. As soon as we frame that as doubling back, that number dropped from 75% to 25%. I was just shocked by the magnitude of that effect because, again, everybody was facing the same choice. We just framed it a little bit differently as doubling back. Let me point out, it’s just a coincidence that those two numbers 75 and 25, summed to 100. But my first impulse was there must have been some coding mistake in the data where maybe we flipped the numbers on the 25, and that should have actually been 75. 

[00:18:52.250] – Clayton Critcher 

We double-checked, we triple-checked the data, and no, the effect really was that big. Instead of being, I think, surprised by the specific mechanisms or the effect itself. I think we were surprised time and time again by just how robust and large this version is. 

[00:19:10.900] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, I want to go back to what Christine said earlier. It is not really about the time. It is about the narrative of the progress that we are telling ourselves. We talked about some real-life examples in the beginning. How might this phenomenon show up in real life, say in a workplace or personal decision Can you go back to that? Kristin, what do you think? 

[00:19:33.060] – Kristine Cho 

I think we see the literal version of doubling back aversion all the time in everyday life, like when we’re driving, going to the office, etc. That’s the physical side of it, I would say. But the more metaphorical version where we resist undoing progress in non-physical tasks, I think shows up just as often, especially in long, complex projects. Sometimes when When I’m writing, I spend more time trying to finetune and edit my existing manuscript that I’m honestly not very happy with when it would actually be easier to just draw an entire paragraph or two and start from scratch. I’ve somewhat recently begun to do the latter and just delete and rewrite, which requires doubling back, but is more efficient. I think that this lesson applies more broadly, too. In any In a work context where you’re working on open-ended projects, so things that can be approached or structured in lots of different ways, I think you have to be willing to say, Okay, this isn’t working, and be ready to start over. It can be uncomfortable, but that willingness to backtrack can make a huge difference. 

[00:20:53.600] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Is there any way to overcome or mitigate this bias? What advice might you give to someone trying to make better decisions in the face of this aversion? 

[00:21:04.660] – Kristine Cho 

Right. So great question. And I think while we didn’t directly test ways to reduce doubling back aversion, we think the key probably lies in the very psychology that drives it in the first place. So remember in our studies, people often avoided doubling back even when they clearly recognized that doing so would save them time. And that tells us that simply pointing out The efficiency of backtracking probably isn’t enough to change behavior. What seems to matter more is how people interpret what it means to waste effort. One big reason people seem to resist doubling back is because it feels like admitting their previous work was a waste. To be fair, there’s some emotional truth to that. It can stink to undo something you’ve already invested time and energy in. But what’s important is that you You can’t change the past, but you can’t control what happens next. By refusing to double back, people often end up wasting even more time and effort going forward. Instead of simply highlighting to people what they may already know, basically that they can often reach their desired end state more quickly by doubling back, it may be important to get people to adopt more of a future outlook when thinking about what it means to to be made waitfully. 

[00:22:31.300] – Kristine Cho 

Wasting time by staying the course is something that can be avoided. 

[00:22:37.020] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I hear that this is maybe about the mindset, and I’m curious, what broader implications do your findings have for our understanding of motivation, goal per se, or behavioral economics. 

[00:22:52.020] – Clayton Critcher 

I think two major themes that this research reinforces is, one, people are particularly averse to wasting effort, and two, related to what Christine just said, people are too focused on the past and not enough focused on the future. One thing that’s notable is that we designed our studies so that people really could not have avoided putting themselves in a situation in which it would be advantageous to double back. For example, in our virtual reality study, at first, participants thought there was only one way to go. When participants were, in our next study, tasked with recalling words that started with a certain letter, we told them what letter they had to start with. We almost put them in a difficult or bad situation through no fault of our own and just because of us, the mean experimenters who were setting them up for inefficiency. I think the challenge is that in the real world, people are often responsible for putting themselves in a situation from which they need to double doubling back, and the blame, so to speak, for finding themselves in that situation actually resides with them themselves. If you leave your home and you head the wrong way, you head left when you should have headed right, doubling back also entails admitting to yourself that you made a mistake. 

[00:24:19.560] – Clayton Critcher 

I think that’s going to make doubling back even harder in the real world than what we observed in our studies. I like to say that spending less time dwelling on our past mistakes and spending more time thinking about how we move forward, not just with the hand that we were dealt, but with the hand that we foolishly drew along the way, can help us pursue our goals more efficiently. 

[00:24:45.480] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, Clayton, I’m going to quote you when I talk to my 10-year-old about this. 

[00:24:50.520] – Clayton Critcher 

Don’t blame me. 

[00:24:51.940] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yes. Hearing it from the experts. Yeah, this is a great research study. We talked about it. I am curious what you are thinking next? What are the next questions you are exploring in your research? Does this line of inquiry continue? 

[00:25:08.280] – Clayton Critcher 

Yeah. With Doubling Back Aversion, we studied how people show a reluctance to shift between different means of pursuing a goal. More recently, Christine and I have been studying a related problem. Instead of thinking about how people may switch between options, we’ve been considering how people decide to jump in and move forward with an available option in pursuit of a goal, even in the first place. In many life contexts, people are plagued by a paralysis. Some people continue to explore homes on the market or maybe even potential romantic partners on the market, but are reluctant to commit to an available option. On the one hand, you might think that the key to encouraging commitment is just to make sure that there are many, many options that you’ve looked at to try to make you more and more confident that you found the best available option. But we’ve been looking at how experiencing the loss of an attractive option can encourage you to go ahead and commit to the best of what is left as it starts to raise fears that maybe all the good options are disappearing and it’s time to move forward and make progress. 

[00:26:25.380] – Clayton Critcher 

So the promise of the next shiny object on the horizon It can encourage a chronic indecision. Although many people would probably think it’s a positive or a hopeful take or outlook on life, to think that there’s always something better just around the corner, it’s also the disappearing experience of those shiny objects that can encourage us to go ahead and lock in something that is good enough for now. Just for the record, I’ve been happily married for seven years now, so I locked it in. 

[00:27:00.000] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

That is great for you. Yes, our times were a little bit different, I think. But I think it is interesting that you say there is this reluctance to commit to an available option because there can always be something new or exciting. Yeah, these are different times. All right, so this conversation was wonderful. This brings me to my final question. What is one idea from this work that you hope sticks with listeners long after they finish the episode. 

[00:27:32.200] – Kristine Cho 

Yeah. I would say when working toward your goals, it’s easy to focus only on moving forward. But sometimes stepping back is exactly what sets you up to move ahead more effectively. A single backward step can often be the fastest way to make real progress, like two steps forward or even more. 

[00:27:54.400] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Kristenristen and Clayton, this was a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:28:00.840] – Clayton Critcher 

Thank you so much for having us. This was fun. 

[00:28:02.940] – Kristine Cho 

Thank you so much. 

[00:28:04.060] –  APS’ Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the APS, and I have been speaking to Kristine Cho and Clayton Critcher from the University of California, Berkeley. If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. Would you like to reach us? Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected].