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.”

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

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

"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.

> 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.

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