Scientists discover a new pitfall in how humans think
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have coined a new term to describe a peculiar flaw in our brains. In a recent study, they presented evidence of a common but hitherto unrecognized cognitive bias: the tendency to avoid taking an easier path in life if it involves backtracking.
The researchers called this bias “backtracking aversion.” In several experiments, they found that people often reject more efficient solutions or routes when they require returning to a previous point in the journey. They explain that the subjective fear of adding more workload and the discomfort of “erasing what has been done” fuel this resistance.
“Participants avoided feeling that their previous efforts had been in vain, which led them to choose less efficient alternatives,” they wrote in their article in May in Psychological Science.
A cousin of the sunk cost bias
Psychologists have documented multiple biases related to stubbornness in the face of new information. For example, we often order the same dish at a restaurant, even if someone recommends a better option. There is also the so-called “sunk cost fallacy”: the difficulty of abandoning a disastrous path simply because too much time or money has already been invested in it.
The authors argue that backtracking aversion is a close cousin of this bias and others, but actually describes a distinct cognitive error.
To illustrate this, they present the case of a traveler whose flight from San Francisco to New York is severely delayed and gets stranded in Los Angeles. The airline offers two alternatives: a flight via Denver that would arrive three hours earlier, or one via San Francisco with the same time savings. Although both itineraries reduce the delay identically, most people prefer to reject the one that involves returning to San Francisco.
Putting it to the test
To test it, the team conducted four types of experiments with over 2,500 adults, including Berkeley students and Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteers. In one test, participants walked on different paths in virtual reality; in another, they had to say as many words as they could that began with the same letter.
The results were consistent: backtracking aversion appeared time and time again. In one trial, for example, participants recited words with “G” and then were asked if they wanted to continue with that letter or switch to “T,” which was clearly simpler. In a control group, the option was presented as simply changing the letter; in another, as discarding what had been done and starting over. Although the total effort was the same in both cases, three out of four accepted the change in the control group, but only one in four did so when the option was presented as “going back.”
Backtracking feels wrong
“When I looked at the results, I thought, ‘Is there a mistake? How can there be so much difference?'” commented the lead author, Kristine Cho, a doctoral student in behavioral marketing at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, in an interview with the Association for Psychological Science.
Other researchers will need to confirm these findings, and there are still open questions: how often do we fall into this trap? Does it happen more in certain contexts than in others? In the meantime, at least there is a new culprit we can point to when we stubbornly refuse to take that faster train back home.
This article has been translated from Gizmodo US by Lucas Handley. you can find the original version.
