This is a psychological mechanism called “aversion to retracing one’s steps”. A study from the University of California explains why we act this way.
We make mistakes, but we’re not going back! Have you ever taken a wrong turn while heading somewhere and not gone back and then taken the right path again, even if it would be easier, but still tried to reach the destination from where you are (and it doesn’t matter if you would travel much further that way)?
Cognitive bias. It is a very common psychological mechanism, a cognitive bias called “aversion to retracing one’s steps”, which has now been studied in detail at the University of California.
More work for nothing. The researchers designed 4 different experiments (involving over 2,500 people) to find out what this aversion is actually linked to. And they found that the reason lies above all in not wanting to lose what has been done up to that moment.
It is therefore not the fear of having to make the “effort” of going back and starting from scratch that holds us back in these cases, but precisely the regret of having done something wrong up until that moment and the desire to demonstrate to oneself that after all the path undertaken was “not so wrong”.
