Scientists reveal a widespread but unidentified psychological phenomenon | Hacker News Reader

Scientists reveal a widespread but unidentified psychological phenomenon

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36 pointsthunderbong30 comments

I feel like there’s scientists must have spent a long time researching this seemingly new phenomenon before discovering that the sunk cost fallacy was widely studied. And at that point rather than spend the effort to correct their conclusions they decided to double down and spend even more effort on trying to spin their work as something new and unrelated to the sunk cost fallacy.

"Scientists reveal a previously unidentified term for a widely known phenomenon"

I wonder if the sunk cost fallacy - that usually refers to an abstract cost, like time or money - would truly be the same effect as an aversion to retracing a path in 3D space.

Possible, or even likely, but interesting nonetheless. Towards the end of the article, they describe an interesting other direction of their research that's not so directly correlated with sunk cost:

> More recently, we’ve been examining a related form of hesitation. This time, it’s not in switching paths, but in committing to one at all.

> “While it might seem that having enticing options (e.g., a great apartment one could rent, a fun event one could sign up for) would make commitment easier, we’ve found that it’s often the loss of a great option that finally pushes people to choose. People often hold out for something even better, but the disappearance of a pretty good option inspires some pessimism that encourages people to grab onto what is as good as they can get for now.”

…thereby falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy themselves, amusingly.

Reminds me of the medical researcher Mary Tai[1] who published "A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves" (ie reinvented integral calculus) and tried to double down in a similar fashion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai's_model

The irony, eh?

Having the sunk cost fallacy while researching the sunk cost fallacy.

I see what you did there

From the paper (internal citations omitted):

"This newly documented phenomenon has similarities with and differences from the sunk-cost fallacy; we see them as part of the same family of effects. In one instantiation, the sunk-cost fallacy can dissuade people from completing a goal (e.g., attending a show) if their initial investment failed to yield a return (e.g., a purchased ticket was lost). With doubling-back aversion, the question is not whether people complete a goal but rather what may discourage them from doing so efficiently. In another example, people display unwarranted escalations of commitment—irrationally persevering on a goal—in the hopes of delaying (and possibly escaping) an admission that their initial investments were actually misguided. Losses simply pile up as a result. Doubling-back aversion discourages people from issuing a course correction even when doing so would not require them to accept responsibility for choosing that longer course in the first place. After all, our participants had to travel down a pathway to even see that there was another route available or were first assigned to complete a task in a particular way before they were offered an alternative. That said, both phenomena emphasize that people do not want to take actions that would force themselves to view their previous efforts as a waste, although with doubling-back aversion it was not a waste that they could have avoided."

Is this the most groundbreaking study ever? No. But the researchers do seem to have found something worthy of comment, and I see no reason to believe that they weren't aware of the existing literature on the sunk cost fallacy when they started working on this. In general, you can't dismiss a study as trivially flawed or useless based solely on a popularization for general audiences; such popular explanations often omit context required to make the study make sense for scientifically literate people. Read the actual paper before dismissing it.

It's really subtle the difference between motives of "I have invested so much in this so I feel bad wasting that effort" v/s "I don't feel like turning back, if there's a way forward, I would take it"

This is exactly my thought. I think what they've really discovered their own "publish or perish" grasping at straws reinvention by way of the emperor's new clothes. Perhaps that, in and of itself, requires future funding and publication if we're being 360 degrees honest.

What an interesting phenomenon.

I recently walked through the city to visit some shop, of which there are two in the city. While walking, I noticed that the one I was walking to is actually farther than the other one. The shorter one actually needed me to backtrack like 500m. I decided to keep walking to the farther one, simply because taking the new route would at least give me new impressions, instead of seeing the same building left and right when backtracking. While walking the farther way, I believe it felt shorter, because time passes slower when backtracking.

Not disputing the results, it's just how I experience the world personally, and that only touches the backtracking.

Yeah, I’m not sure if it was considered in the study, but I like taking new paths just to see what I stumble upon.

Seems like it would be a survival trait in the wild. Doubling back reduces your exploration rate (you're not updating your map as much and you're less likely to spot some new snack) while increasing your exposure to unknown predators that might have been alerted but not positively identified you the first time. There's still good reasons to double back, like trying to outwit a known, active pursuer or evader, or being in a very hazardous environment. All else being equal, though, I'd think continuing forward would be more beneficial overall.

The path is the goal.

Exploration is a reward sometimes. You get to see unexpected.

The explicitly stated goal is the path, but for actual living creatures (of the kind that have this in-built bias) the actual goals are far more varied and nuanced.

There is also the fact that often sticking with a mediocre or even bad decision heavily outperforms changing your mind constantly.

This is very true. Just because there's sunk costs doesn't mean you're falling for the sunk costs fallacy. Sure, sometimes you need to just cut your losses and start over, but often it's better to push through (maybe with a bit of a rethink) and get some degree of useful result than it is to just scrap everything and start over.

This "unknown phenomenon" is so unknown that it is one of the most discussed topics in behavioral psychology. Even in popular science it is well known.

Some of the most well known books about psychology, like "thinking fast and slow", describe how humans act seemingly irrational under various scenarios. Finding another example is the exact opposite of "unidentified".

Surely the researchers must be aware of the discourse and the competing theories to explain the thousands of other examples of this?

They’re probably aware. From the paper:

> We end by discussing how doubling-back aversion is distinct from established phenomena (e.g., the sunk-cost fallacy).

Is the author of this pop sci article aware? Hard to tell.

How is that relevant at all?

They pretend that behavioral psychology somehow isn't aware that perceived human irrationality is very common.

Finding just another example of that is not noticing a previously unobserved phenomenon.

Brian does not want to work like a GPS to continuously suggest an alternate route. The purpose of thinking is not to think. Thinking is hard work and it takes some effort to make a decision. Once a decision is made, to constantly reevaluate the decision takes extraordinary mental energy and a mindset thats second guessing your own decisions every second.

My wife calls it going backwards to go forward and she can't stand it. Even planning a trip across multiple countries she needed our overall flight plans to move in a single direction.

> she needed our overall flight plans to move in a single direction.

So do you always circle around the Earth in order to get back home?

No. The final flight could go back because that was the "return" flight. We had a good laugh about the logic of that.

You know what's funny, I almost never see people turn-around and go backwards in real life. I do it all the time when I change my mind, but other people just don't do it. It's one of those things that makes this world feel like a simulation rather than 8 billion people actually thinking for themselves.

I see this all the time in tech, where a solution is found for a problem, but later that solution will have problems of its own. Then the focus becomes solving the solution's problem, and even the solution's problem solution's problems.

All that in lieu of coming back to the original problem and rethinking how to solve it.

Looks like this experiment is conducted in US. If you are walking in US, you'll end up on nextdoor and if you went one way, changed your mind and went the other way, your picture will be on nextdoor from many people's ring/etc cameras, reporting a suspicious person walking on the street and if other neighbors have seen this suspicious person.

> The aversion was strongest when both components of doubling back were present — undoing past work and starting over with a full task.

E.g. Cursor’s “Discard and revert” option, which I miss in Claude Code.

Cursor trains us out of the aversion to doubling back.

Study 1: “In the first study, college students…”

Study 2: generate 40 words, after 10, ask whether they want to switch to a different letter and restart from 0. The researchers expect people to 1) know that there are more words in their language with the second letter so it’s easier 2) expect them to think it’s so much faster it’s worth undoing 25% progress.

I’m sorry but this sounds like bad science, as is common in this field.

What a bizarre headline.

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