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.
Having the sunk cost fallacy while researching the sunk cost fallacy.
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?
> 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.
E.g. Cursor’s “Discard and revert” option, which I miss in Claude Code.
Cursor trains us out of the aversion to doubling back.
7bit•4h ago
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.
elhenrico•4h ago