Scientists Identify a New Glitch in Human Thinking

Gizmodo

3 days ago

Good news, everyone! Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have coined a new term to describe our brains being dumb. In a recent study, they provide evidence for a distinct but common kind of cognitive bias—one that makes us reluctant to take the easier path in life if it means retracing our steps.
The researchers have named the bias the 'doubling-back aversion.' In several experiments, they found that people often refuse to choose a more efficient solution or route if it requires them to double back on the progress already made. The findings suggest that people's subjective fear of adding more to their workload and their hesitance to wipe the slate clean contribute to this bias, the researchers say.
'Participants' aversion to feeling their past efforts were a waste encouraged them to pursue less efficient means,' they wrote in their paper, published this May in Psychological Science.
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Psychologists have detailed all sorts of biases related to digging our feet in when faced with important new information. People tend to stick to the status quo in choosing dinner at a favorite restaurant, for example, even when someone recommends a potentially tastier option. There's also the sunk cost fallacy, or the reluctance to veer off a disastrous path and choose another simply because they've spent so much time or resources pursuing it. The researchers argue that their newly named bias is certainly a close cousin to the sunk cost fallacy and similar biases, but that it ultimately describes a unique type of cognitive pitfall.
In their paper, they provide the example of someone whose flight from San Francisco to New York becomes massively delayed early on, leaving them stuck in Los Angeles. In one scenario, the traveler can get home three hours earlier than their current itinerary if they accept the airline's offer of a new flight that first stops in Denver; in the second, the person is instead offered a flight that will also shave three hours off, but they'll first have to travel back to San Francisco. Despite both flights saving the same amount of time, people are more likely to refuse the one that requires going back to their earlier destination, the paper explains (some people might even refuse the Denver flight, but that would be an example of the status quo bias and/or sunk cost fallacy at work, they note).
To test their hypothesis, the researchers ran four different types of experiments. The experiments collectively involved more than 2,500 adults, some of whom were UC Berkeley students and others who were volunteers recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. In one test, people were asked to walk along different paths in virtual reality; another asked people to recite as many words starting with the same letter as possible. Across the various tests, the researchers found that people routinely exhibited this aversion.
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In one experiment where people had to recite words starting with 'G,' for instance, everyone was asked midway through if they wanted to stay with the same letter or switch to reciting words starting with 'T' (a likely easier letter). In the control condition, this decision was framed as staying on the same task, simply with a new letter, but in the other, people were asked if they wanted to throw out the work they had done so far and start over on a new task. Importantly, the volunteers were also given progress bars for the task, allowing them to see they would perform the same amount of work no matter the choice (though again, 'T' would be easier). About 75% of participants made the choice to switch in the control condition, but only 25% did the same when the switch was presented as needing to double back.
'When I was analyzing these results, I was like, 'Oh, is there a mistake? How can there be such a big difference?'' said lead author Kristine Cho, a behavioral marketing PhD student at UC Berkely's Haas School of Business, in a statement to the Association for Psychological Science, publishers of the study.
Other researchers will have to confirm the team's findings, of course. And there are still plenty of questions to answer about this aversion, including how often we fall for it and whether it's more likely to happen in some scenarios than others. But for now, it's oddly comforting to know that there's another thing I can possibly blame for my occasional stubbornness to take the faster subway train home.