I recently built a small flashcard web app to help me learn and avoid various cognitive biases and logical fallacies. I find it helpful to document and recognise these behaviours, so I can avoid blindly repeating them in future.
As any reader of Daniel Kahneman will know, our decisions are often less rational than we might believe them to be. This is often due to faulty pattern recognition, in which our neurons fire in response to a perceived situation that is in fact a simplified and therefore inaccurate model of the truth. The ways in which we erroneously lean on such models in favoured directions are biases, and the errors we make in the logic for decisions we make are fallacies.
Psychologists recently gave a name to a long-observed phenomenon in which people are inclined to double-down on the incorrect route to a goal, even when knowing it would be faster to retrace their steps. This cognitive bias is now known as doubling-back aversion and it shares some DNA with the sunk costs fallacy, but they are distinct:
- Sunk costs fallacy: sticking with a bad option because you’ve already invested resources (time, money, effort).
- Doubling-back aversion: avoiding a better option if it means retracing or undoing visible progress, even without any real sunk investment.
With doubling-back aversion, you could know you’ll save time or effort overall, but the feeling of “erasing progress” or “starting over” deters you.
I guess we've all been there. All the better, then, to have a label to apply to a behavioural glitch that we'd be best eliminating.