UC Berkeley Haas researchers uncover a psychological bias that keeps people on the wrong path

Research by marketing professor Clayton Critcher and doctoral student Kristine Cho finds that “doubling-back aversion” wastes time and lowers productivity.

Picture this: You step out your front door and take a left to walk to a new store. Halfway down the block, you realize it would’ve been faster to get there by turning right. But even though it’s still quicker to retrace your steps, you keep going the long way around to avoid doubling back.

You’d be in good company.

New research by UC Berkeley Haas professor Clayton Critcher and doctoral student Kristine Cho, PhD 27, published in the journal Psychological Science, has identified a new 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, a professor of marketing, cognitive science, and psychology and director of Berkeley Haas Behavioral Lab.

Their findings carry widespread implications for workplace decisions and life: The aversion to scrapping past work on a project—even when it means reaching a goal faster —leads to huge losses in time and productivity.

But there’s a simple trick that an help overcome this cognitive bias, Critcher and Cho suggest: Reframing how we look at past efforts.

Inside the experiments

Critcher and Cho wondered whether people resist doubling back because they mistakenly believe it’s objectively longer. They tested that question by showing about 200 participants a virtual hallway. After people started down the hallway, they saw a map that clearly showed the quickest route was retracing their steps versus taking another route that was 20% longer.

For half of the participants, however, there was a twist—instead of directly doubling back, their shorter path ran parallel to their original one, so technically they weren’t retracing their steps, even though they had to reverse direction temporarily. The results were stark: when the path required retracing their steps, only 42% took it; when it didn’t, 69% took it—a 27-point difference.

“Both of us were surprised by the sheer number of participants who decided not to take the easier, quicker route, just because it required doubling back,” says Cho. “The size of the effect was shocking.”

What’s more, when they asked participants afterwards why they didn’t take the easier route, they admitted that they knew it was shorter but took the longer one anyway. This made it clear that it was the subjective sense of doubling back, and not the objective estimation of distance that mattered.

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

The researchers further tested this distaste for wasted effort in several other experiments. In one, 400 participants were asked to think of 40 words that begin with the letter G. Once they’d submitted 10 words, they were given the option of switching to an easier task: thinking of 30 words that begin with the letter T. Their willingness to switch had everything to do with how that option was framed. When told their prior work would be discarded and they would have to start over on a new task, only 25% switched. When told their earlier work would carry over, and thus they had only three-quarters of the task remaining, 75% switched.

“We actually had people estimate how many additional minutes and seconds the task would take them,” says Critcher, who holds the Joe Shoong Chair in Business. “Even when they recognized they could save time, they were still reluctant to do that.”

A cognitive bias with real costs

The results aren’t merely an academic argument. We go down blind alleys all the time in the workplace, trying to solve a problem one way before realizing there’s an easier way to do it. For example, it may be that halfway through constructing a spreadsheet or database you realize there are better ways to categorize the data; or halfway through writing a paper, you realize you’d be better off with an entirely different structure.

“In many contexts, actually, a more efficient route becomes even clearer over the course of your first attempt,” says Critcher.

Doubling-back aversion is a distinct cognitive bias, different from the “sunk-cost fallacy” where people refuse to abandon a failing course of action—such as an investor who throws good money after bad because they don’t want to admit their initial investment was a waste. “In this case, we’re not talking about abandoning a goal—we’re talking resistance to how one approaches a goal.”

How to overcome doubling-back aversion

He and Cho suggest that the agony of doubling back can be reduced by reframing. Those past efforts were not a waste if you learned something, in the process” he says. “It’s only a waste if you keep doing the same bad thing over and over.” 

Practical strategies include:

• Reframing past efforts as part of the discovery process rather than a waste of time
• Preserve earlier work in some way—for example, putting deleted paragraphs into a separate document for possible future use so they’re not simply discarded.
• Define waste in terms of the future, which is all that can be changed, instead of the past, which is fixed.

“Understanding that what’s in the past is in the past frees you to make better decisions,” Cho says. “You have to focus on what you can change, which is the future.”er decisions,” Cho says. “You have to focus on what you can change, which is the future.”

Read the full paper:

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

 by Kristine Y. Cho and Clayton R. Critcher

Psychological Science,  2025