The Backtrack Trap

Imagine stepping out your door and taking a left to walk to a new store. Halfway down the block, you realize it would’ve been faster turning right. But even though it’s quicker to retrace your steps, you keep going the long way around to avoid doubling back.

New research by Professor Clayton Critcher and Kristine Cho, PhD 27, published in the journal Psychological Science, has identified this scenario as a cognitive bias they call “doubling-back aversion.” 

“People don’t like to feel that what they did in the past was a waste, so they end up wasting more time in the future,” says Critcher.

Their findings carry widespread implications for workplace decisions and life: The aversion people have to scrapping their past work on a project—even when they’ll get to their goal faster—leads to huge losses in time and productivity. 

In one experiment, after people started down a virtual hallway, half saw a map that clearly showed the quickest route was doubling back the way they came versus taking another route that was 20% longer. The other half saw a shorter path running parallel to their original one, so technically they weren’t retracing their steps. When the shorter path required completely retracing steps, only 42% took it versus 69% in the parallel-path group. 

“A surprising number of people explicitly said, ‘I don’t want to have to redo all of my progress so far,’” Cho says. 

To avoid doubling-back aversion, the researchers recommend reframing the effort as part of the discovery process rather than as a waste of time and preserving earlier work—for example, by saving deleted paragraphs in a separate document so they’re not lost. Focusing on the future benefit rather than past effort can also shift attention to the faster path forward.

“Understanding that what’s in the past is in the past frees you to make better decisions,” Cho says.