Pod Insights Choiceology with Katy Milkman Why Starting Over Hurts About this episode Even when turning back is the smartest option, there's a strong pull to keep moving forward. In this episode, we explore why people push ahead even when a better path is available.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:08 Speaker 00 So I was putting together this bed frame, one of the ones that have the drawers underneath.
0:13 Speaker 01 My husband and I, for our honeymoon, actually, decided to do a bike trip.
0:19 Speaker 00 About halfway through, I noticed I'd actually put one of the big panels on backwards.
0:24 Speaker 01 I pointed out that there was a route that we could take on a bike path that was off the road and away from cars, and I thought would be more pleasant and scenic. We leave the road, get on this path, and it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that this is not a great route.
0:42 Speaker 00 I paused for a second, and I clearly remember thinking, OK, you should probably take it apart and start over. But it looked kind of close to done, and I really, really hate assembling furniture, and it was such a long day of moving.
0:57 Speaker 01 It's buggy, the path is not always firm, like it's a bit gravelly or sandy, and the bike wheels keep getting kind of stuck in, and we have to get off and walk with the trailer. It's hot, it's getting hotter.
1:11 Speaker 00 And I figured, you know what? I'm just gonna keep going, and somehow it's just gonna work out. So I kept going, I started jamming pieces together.
1:20 Speaker 01 I can feel my husband getting irritated, and eventually he just asked me, can we just go back? I was like, nope, I don't want to go backwards. We have 50 miles left to go today, and I don't want to add more miles. Can we just keep going?
1:37 Speaker 00 And as you probably guessed, this was a really bad idea, because that turned into like 45 minutes of a complete struggle, and in the end, I had to take apart the whole thing and put it back together.
1:51 Speaker 01 There was a voice that was telling me that might be the faster route, after all, anyway. I was committed to the bike path.
2:02 Katy Milkman? No one wants to backtrack, even when it's the best option. It makes us feel like our past effort has been wasted. In this episode, we'll look at why we're often so reluctant to revisit an approach we'd previously passed over, or restart a project or journey from scratch.
2:29 Katy Milkman? I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
3:05 Speaker 03 The Panama Canal became an imperative in the mid-19th century with the California Gold Rush. People were leaving various places in the eastern parts of the country to make their way to California. What did this mean? Did it mean wagon trains across the Rocky Mountains? Did it mean circumnavigating South America? And what about the gold? How are you going to get this gold back?
3:34 Katy Milkman? In the late 1880s, global trade was booming, but geography still imposed huge delays in costs. To move from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, ships had to round the southern tip of South America, a long and sometimes dangerous detour. A shortcut through Central America promised to change everything.
3:55 Speaker 03 The next big idea was, what about a canal? Hello, I'm Clifford Thies. I'm a professor of economics at Shenandoah University in Virginia.
4:06 Katy Milkman? Clifford studies and writes about how infrastructure shapes trade, growth, and the flow of wealth across the world. The Panama Canal has been enormously important for trade ever since it opened in 1914. But building it was a decades-long struggle of ambition, costly mistakes, engineering challenges, and lives lost. Its construction was one of the largest undertakings in human history: to carve a pathway between two oceans through the isthmus of Panama.
4:36 Katy Milkman? It was a land of mountains, impenetrable jungle, deep swamps, torrential rains, hot sun, debilitating humidity, pestilence, and some of the most geologically complex land formations in the world.
4:52 Speaker 03 The climatic challenge and the geographic challenge of the Isthmus was enormous.
5:00 Katy Milkman? The idea of cutting a waterway across Panama had been around for centuries. The California Gold Rush and then the Panama Railroad revived the dream. The question was who would tackle this massive project? The answer: France.
5:17 Speaker 03 What was the French interest? It was business. They were thinking this would be profitable.
5:23 Katy Milkman? By 1869, French engineers had successfully completed the Suez Canal, a sea-level canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, slashing months off the journey between Europe and Asia. The Suez Canal was a triumph for France. It put the country at the very heart of global commerce, a symbol of ingenuity and influence. And the man most applauded for this marvel of engineering was a French diplomat by the name of Ferdinand de Lysseps.
5:51 Speaker 03 Ferdinand Lysseps was a great entrepreneur. He was great at raising money as well as managing really big projects. He's just coming off the construction of this Suez Canal, which in his own way is very impressive. So he's now looking for the next big project.
6:15 Speaker 04 So Ferdinand de Lysseps was descended from a line of French diplomats. His father was a French diplomat. His uncle was. His grandfather was. He did not study engineering. He did not study business either.
6:28 Katy Milkman? This is Daniel.
6:29 Speaker 04 My name is Daniel Dematos. I'm the author of "Tantin Coffee House: A Blog on Financial History." The Suez Canal turns out to be a great success. Construction starts in 1859. It's finished within 10 years. It takes a while, but it's a 200-kilometer or about 120-mile-long canal. It makes him famous. It's a time when French engineers are particularly famous in the world. France has some of the best engineering universities at a time when actually such a thing was pretty rare in the world. And de Lysseps becomes known as this very, very successful businessman and also someone who advances France's power and prestige in the world through the Suez Canal project.
7:08 Katy Milkman? At the time, if any country could build a canal across the isthmus of Panama, it would be France, with Lysseps leading the charge.
7:16 Speaker 04 So Lysseps founds a company to build a canal across Panama. But before then, he's actually involved in various organizations that are exploring the possibility of building a canal, even before the company is established. And one of these organizations sends an expedition team to Panama and Colombia. Panama was at that point a part of Colombia. And one of these expeditions is led by a man named Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wise. He was actually descended of Napoleon Bonaparte's brother.
7:49 Speaker 04 So the expedition team returns to France, recommending a canal with locks.
7:54 Katy Milkman? Locks, if you're not familiar, are watertight chambers with two sets of gates, used to raise or lower boats between stretches of water that are at different levels.
8:04 Speaker 04 And this is rejected by Lysseps, who has experience building a sea-level canal in Egypt, but not a canal with locks.
8:11 Katy Milkman? A sea-level canal is essentially a long uninterrupted trough dug out of the land to connect two sea-level entrances. This is how the Suez Canal was constructed. Now, back to Lysseps.
8:23 Speaker 04 He sends the expedition team out again, so they return to Panama. By now, it's 1877, and they're going with two missions.
8:30 Katy Milkman? The first objective was to continue to stake out the area where they're going to build the canal. The second was to secure a concession from the government of Colombia. Surprisingly, the team spent little time in the Panama region.
8:42 Speaker 04 It seems very half-hearted. In fact, Wise is actually spending most of his time in Bogota, in Colombia, securing the concession from the government. And when they return from France, this time, they recommend a canal without locks, which is exactly what Lysseps wanted.
8:58 Katy Milkman? Luseps had sold the project to its funders based on his sea-level Suez Canal success. He was familiar with a sea-level project. And while it required more excavation, it was bound to be more profitable, because when finished, there's less friction. A sea-level canal is more efficient, because it allows ships to sail right through. There's no stopping, no machinery. A lock canal, by contrast, lifts and lowers ships through a series of chambers using dammed water. It's much more complicated to build, and more time-consuming to operate once it's completed.
9:31 Speaker 04 So there was a lot of appeal for a canal without locks, a sea-level canal, like in the style of Suez.
9:38 Katy Milkman? And when Luseps invited a group of prominent engineers in 1879 to weigh in on how to approach the Panama Canal construction, they almost all agreed with him, save for a few uniquely qualified individuals.
9:53 Speaker 04 One of them is a man named Adolph Godin, and he is rather distinguished because he heads a big government civil engineering department, and he's also one of the few people there who has experience building anything in the tropics. He had previously worked on a railroad project in Mexico, and was familiar with the dangers unique to that area. So he's arguing against the sea-level canal in favor of something that's going to require less work.
10:19 Katy Milkman? The reality of a sea-level approach, especially in this part of the world, is that it would require a lot more work upfront. Massive amounts of earth and rock need to be moved through mountainous terrain. But most of the engineers in the room that day had never been to Panama, including Luseps. They didn't know what kinds of challenges the project would face, or at least not how extreme they might be. So despite serious objections, including one from Alexander Gustave Eiffel, yes, of Eiffel Tower fame, Luseps went ahead with his sea-level plan.
10:55 Katy Milkman? The project did not get off to a good start. Almost immediately, Lyseps had to reduce the cost estimate in order to garner enough support and secure funding.
11:05 Speaker 04 Initially, the cost estimate that's devised for this canal project is 1.2 billion francs. That is the amount that Lyseps would have had to raise to fund his Panama Canal project. And 1.2 billion francs would have been an astronomical amount of money at the time. It would be the modern day equivalent of about 7 to maybe even 7.5 billion US dollars.
11:26 Katy Milkman? That would make it one of the largest private infrastructure projects ever attempted, with only some government backing. Lyseps was left to promote and finance the project largely by himself, and he was not initially successful.
11:40 Speaker 04 He's not raising enough money from investors. So he goes to Panama. This is his first visit to the country during the dry season, when the weather is relatively mild. And he comes back from that trip with a revised cost estimate of a little over 650 million francs. And he is able to ultimately raise that amount of money.
12:02 Katy Milkman? With half of the original budget, the project kicks off, and a series of challenges follow. The Shagriss River had to be controlled. The terrain's slopes meant that heavy rainfall caused the river to swell, creating flash floods. The amount of earth and rock that had to be removed was colossal, a task that seriously challenged 19th century machinery. The geology was unstable. Made up of volcanic rock, soft clay, marine deposits, it was unpredictable. Deadly landslides collapsed excavated walls again and again, burying equipment and killing workers.
12:45 Katy Milkman? Panama's hot rainy climate makes for a dense, fast-growing jungle, so relentless that cleared areas quickly reclaim themselves. And mosquitoes, so many mosquitoes. Streams were blocked to manage floods, creating stagnant pools that bred even more of the insects. And malaria and yellow fever swept through the crews, killing thousands.
13:13 Katy Milkman? A few years in, it's increasingly apparent that the sea-level approach isn't working. The project is way off track.
13:20 Speaker 04 So over 1885, there's a lot of challenges that come up in the construction of the canal. This is a long, tortured process. This is what 1886 and 1887 has spent on. There's a new director appointed. There've been a lot of turnover in the Panama Canal project. And he insinuates that there is trouble with continuing down the current course of a sea-level canal and attempts to convince Lyseps to go with a modified design that would involve locks. Lyseps goes back to Panama, his second trip to the country in 1886. He's also there to reassure investors at the same time, because some of this has become public back in Europe.
14:02 Katy Milkman? It had become clear that a sea-level canal couldn't be achieved under the circumstances. The only remaining prospect for success lay in a high-level lock canal. But Lyseps resisted. A lock canal would be backtracking, reverting to a plan he had originally rejected.
14:20 Speaker 04 Lyseps, even at the end of 1886, is not convinced that a sea-level canal cannot be built, but he's acknowledging that there are wider problems. And he's actually quite publicly acknowledging these problems and that the experience from Suez was just a simpler experience and this is going to be more challenging.
14:41 Katy Milkman? When Lyseps finally agreed to explore alternatives, he spent another nine months studying plans before taking action.
14:49 Speaker 04 Over the course of 1886 and early 1887, there are various reports that are released. Some are government reports, some are actually internal reports commissioned by the company itself. And they are increasingly doubtful of the current course of things. And one of these reports does just flat-out recommend converting a project to a new plan, one that involves constructing locks. Lyseps waivers over the course of 1887 and really only in November that year announces the change in plans and the abandonment of the sea-level canal project.
15:28 Katy Milkman? By this point, Lyseps had invested enormous amounts of time, money, and prestige into the sea level plan. Admitting it wouldn't work would have meant acknowledging that much of that effort and many lives had been wasted.
15:41 Speaker 04 And he had spent years convincing investors to invest in his company on the basis of a sea level canal project. And when you have that many people counting on your venture, I think it certainly would have made him quite hesitant to go back to his investors and ask for more money, but this time with a plan that he had been arguing against for years.
16:02 Katy Milkman? By 1887, French engineers confirmed that a high-level lock canal through Panama was possible, allowing vessels to transit while leaving open the option to dredge to sea level later. And Lyseps reluctantly agreed to this plan.
16:17 Katy Milkman? By 1888, work was progressing well. Lyseps was trying to raise more money, but unfortunately, it was too little, too late. The money ran out.
16:31 Katy Milkman? The French attempt at the Panama Canal, later known as the Panama Affair, ended in scandal. Some 800,000 investors lost their life savings in Lyseps' company's bankruptcy, and there's the more painful number of over 22,000 lives lost.
16:49 Katy Milkman? One man's unwillingness to backtrack and adopt a plan he'd initially rejected as soon as it became clear this was the only viable path ultimately brought ruin to the project and to those who believed in it.
17:04 Katy Milkman? In the end, the Panama Canal took Americans, arriving later with more advanced technology, as well as some key French lessons in hand, to finish the canal we know today. It's been more than a century since the Panama Canal was completed in 1914. It stands as a cornerstone of global commerce. Each year, about 14,000 ships from more than 170 countries pass through its locks, carrying roughly 6% of the world's seaborne trade. Daniel Dematos's blog, The Tontine Coffee House, marries finance, economics, and history. Clifford Thies is a professor of economics at Shenandoah University. You can find more
17:47 Katy Milkman? information, along with links to their work, in the show notes and at schwab.com/choysology.
17:58 Katy Milkman? Ferdinand de Lyssepp's failure in Panama was one of epic proportions. But in hearing the story, you may have felt some sympathy for Lyssepp's. While most of us won't be involved in projects of this magnitude, we can all relate to the desire to avoid retracing our steps. If we've made a decision to pick Plan A over Plan B, the idea of abandoning Plan A in the middle, only to adopt Plan B, sounds pretty awful. My next guest has published new research that helps explain why we're so loath to double back in the middle of a project or other pursuit. Clayton Critcher, along with his collaborator Christine Cho, have identified what they call doubling back aversion.
18:42 Katy Milkman? It's defined as a reluctance to pursue more efficient means to a goal when doing so requires undoing progress you've already made. Clayton Critcher is a professor of marketing, cognitive science, and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Business. Hi Clayton, welcome to Choiceology.
19:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, Katie, thanks so much for having me.
19:02 Katy Milkman? Could you give me examples of some of the situations where you think doubling back aversion is particularly prone to come up and lead us to make bad decisions?
19:12 Speaker 05 Sure, I'll give you two motivating examples that were actually the motivating examples for us in starting this project. So, one, I live in downtown San Francisco, so I walk most places. So, as soon as I leave my condo building, I'm always going left or I'm going right as soon as I walk out the door. And I've noticed that if I head in a certain direction, so let's say I head out going left, maybe I'll go a block down and I'll think, you know, it would actually be a lot quicker if I had gone the other route. And actually, it would be faster if I just made a U-turn right now and went the way that I should have gone to begin with. But I almost never do that. And it's not just because I'm afraid of looking ridiculous on the sidewalk,
19:55 Speaker 05 but it's just that it seems kind of painful to retrace all of those steps that you've just taken. The other way in which this came up was... There was a time where I was flying a lot between the West Coast and the East Coast, going to New York. And often, the direct flight from San Francisco to New York is pretty expensive because it caters to business travelers. And so it'd be a lot cheaper to do a stopover somewhere. So I was often flying down to LA and then heading on from LA to New York. The problem one time was I had a really long delay going from Los Angeles to New York. And the airline gave me an option in their app to change to another flight
20:39 Speaker 05 that would allow me to get to New York more quickly. So what was kind of funny is that when I saw the first option that would get me there the fastest was actually to fly back to San Francisco and then take the direct flight to New York. So for no additional charge, but the idea of retracing those steps metaphorically here, flying back to where I started from seemed crazy and I didn't do it. But I remember thinking, if that stopover were somewhere else in the country, if it were in Denver, if it were in Dallas, then I would have happily done that to shave a few hours off the rest of my day. But doubling back there, even though it was going to be the most efficient way to get me where I was going, was just too aversive to actually do. And so I didn't do it.
21:21 Katy Milkman? Those examples are so interesting, but it's also interesting that you chose two examples that involve physical movement. Because when I first read about this work, the first thing I thought about was the experience we have when we're revising an academic paper in response to feedback and how we resist throwing out our original studies and redoing them in new ways that critics have suggested, or rewriting sections, even if it would improve the final manuscript. Because it feels so painful to undo the work we've already completed. Did that come to mind for you at all? Because To me, it seems like it's not just about the physical activities where we wouldn't want to double back, but it's also about our work products.
22:05 Speaker 05 I think that's exactly right. So the physical examples are the ones that I find most easily resonate with people first. But where I see doubling back aversion now all the time in my work life is a slight variance on what you said in terms of paper writing. So for people who may not know kind of the process of writing an academic paper, I always think, and I always tell my students to reassure them, that the hardest part of writing a paper is writing the introduction of a paper. It's the part in our job that is the least well-defined of what exactly the structure of a paper should look like. And so in my writing process with students, I always have them write the first draft. And I used to
22:50 Speaker 05 work as an advisor by taking what they did and thinking, how do I go through line by line, sentence by sentence, and try to modify this or give comments to try to help push us toward what I think will be a good final product. What I have realized after the doubling back aversion project is sometimes the most efficient way forward is, and it could be a little bit painful for the student involved, but to actually say, all right, let's actually delete what we've done so far. Let's have a discussion about what was good, what maybe wasn't about this approach, and then just start over. That can feel like you're going backward, but I think it's often the most efficient way to a final product that everyone is happy with.
23:33 Katy Milkman? I love that example. So I want to move from talking high level about these ideas and all their implications to actually getting into some of the science, because you did some really elegant experiments to demonstrate that doubling back aversion isn't just a thing we perceive in the world, but is a very real phenomenon that plagues us. Could you talk a little bit about your favorite study from your paper demonstrating that doubling back aversion is a real problem for people?
23:59 Speaker 05 So our participants, they had come into our lab. They had to walk in a virtual reality world. Now, what we were actually interested in was what was the route that they would actually take. So in the virtual reality world, as they started off, it looked like there was only one way forward. So they would take about 10 or 15 virtual steps forward and then they arrived at a map. And when they got to the map, they saw there are actually two ways to get to that endpoint. So one was a clearly longer route that involved continuing forward, taking a left, veering around, arriving at the endpoint.
24:36 Speaker 05 But the other route was about 20% shorter and it was slightly different between our two conditions. So in a control condition, you had to veer right, then take a few steps back, veer left, go around, and you could get there, like I said, about 20% more quickly. In the doubling back aversion condition, once you saw the map, you saw, oh, actually, if I just walk directly backward to the beginning, then there's a faster route there that's the same length as the short route in our other condition, our control condition. But there, people are about 25 or 30 percentage points less likely to want to actually double back,
25:19 Speaker 05 take that U-turn, retrace those steps, even though it was going to save them time in the end. And for those of us who do a lot of experiments, we know for most of our participants, I think their main goal is to get out of there relatively quickly. So they were naturally incentivized to try to reach that end state as quickly as possible, but they were willing to waste more time, even though it was going to take them longer to avoid doubling back.
25:45 Katy Milkman? And could you talk a little bit about what causes this? I mean, it's very intuitive that we don't enjoy doubling back, but you know, why is that so painful? What is it about our psychology that makes us avoid this process?
26:01 Speaker 05 So when we started out, we had two different ideas about what might drive doubling back aversion. And this was one of those projects where upfront, we really didn't know which one was right. And those are the most exciting projects for me. It wasn't like we had one clear idea and the other was what we might call a straw man hypothesis. We really didn't know which one was true. So one that seemed plausible to us was that if you're going to go back to the beginning, start over, double back and then proceed, it just seems like it's going to take a lot longer to actually reach that end state. After all, you're doing some wasted effort in there that you could have avoided. And so that might just seem like it's going to actually take more time in the end.
26:46 Speaker 05 In other words, maybe people don't realize or recognize the efficiency advantage that often comes from doubling back. We found very weak evidence that only sometimes supported that idea. For the most part, people realized that it was actually quicker to double back and then proceed again from the beginning. Instead, what we found was people thought about the work that they had already done or the work that they had left to do in a subjectively different way when they involve doubling back. People are really averse to feeling like efforts that they have put in in the past were a waste.
27:26 Speaker 05 So if you directly double back, you're implicitly acknowledging that you wasted those efforts to get you to where you are at the current point. And so turning around, starting over, kind of makes you feel bad about the effort that you've already put in. Of course, the irony is that in an effort to try to protect your own psyche and feel like you haven't been engaging in wasteful efforts is you're going to actually waste more time in the future by taking those longer inefficient routes that don't involve doubling back. So I think that connects to a broader theme that people are very focused on feeling good about what they have already done in the past.
28:10 Speaker 05 And often they are not good at thinking about the future and what is the best way forward, recognizing the past is fixed, that can't be changed. All we can do in our lives going forward is try to make the best decisions, given the current status quo.
28:26 Katy Milkman? Yeah, well, that explanation in the paper and the research make me think about what we know about people's inability to ignore sunk costs, right? Costs that have already been exerted or money that you've already spent that's not recoverable at this point, but we still seem to fixate on that. And also our tendency to escalate commitment to whatever course of action we've already selected, even when it's not the best course of action, which are actually both topics we've discussed in previous episodes of this show. So it feels like a very related bias, but I also know it's distinct. Could you talk a little bit about what makes this a distinct bias from escalation of commitment and the sunk cost fallacy?
29:08 Speaker 05 Sure. I think they're related. I think they're part of the same family of effects, but I think they're a little bit different in what gives rise to them and just the specific form that they take. So there's a few different types of sunk cost fallacies. I think the most relevant one is one that you alluded to, what's called escalation of commitment. So the classic example there is I've invested money in some project. It's a failing venture. It becomes clear to me that it's almost certainly a failing venture, but I don't want to feel bad about myself that I have thrown all of this money after what is actually a bad idea.
29:48 Speaker 05 And I hold on to this almost irrational hope that if I just keep throwing more resources at this, that maybe it's going to turn around and turn into a success. So that's a case where the smart thing to do would be to just walk away, to abandon that goal and take your minimal losses instead of adding more and more to those losses. So I think we're a little bit different in two ways. So for us, the question is never whether you should abandon your goal altogether. So in the study I described, people are going to make it to that end state. They're going to make it to the second study. If you're writing that paper, you're not going to just give up on the project.
30:31 Speaker 05 You're eventually going to have a final version of that.
30:36 Speaker 05 Draft. But the question is, how exactly are you going to get there? And what and how flexible are you going to be in the means that you take to make it to that end state? So I think that's one difference in terms of sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment is often about should you abandon a goal? And for us, it's more about what's the right means to take to get to that goal or end state? I think the other difference is escalation of commitment is often premised on the idea that you don't want to accept that maybe in the past you made a mistake. You are a bad decision maker. When we designed our studies, we always did so in a way that our participants would take minimal
31:21 Speaker 05 or no responsibility for their initial course of action. So in the study where they navigated a virtual world, when they first saw where they were going, they didn't even see there was a second possible pathway to go. We set it up that way intentionally. Or in some of our later studies, we would just assign people to complete a task in a certain way first, and then give them an option to double back down the road. So there was no potential for people to think, oh, I don't want to admit to myself that I wasn't very smart in how I approached this task to begin with. And so even when we take that potential for personal responsibility out of the picture, people still are unwilling to double back.
32:03 Katy Milkman? Oh, I love that. And the fact that it's still present even when it's not about saving face, as in the case of you walking left when you should have walked right out of your apartment building. And you still see the effect is really nice.
32:15 Speaker 05 Exactly. And there are a lot of cases where we probably are responsible for our initial course of action, but we've shown that that's not a necessary ingredient for doubling back aversion.
32:26 Katy Milkman? So I want to turn from talking about this bias and all the problems with our human operating system to actually thinking a little bit about solutions. I know our listeners will be really interested in how now that they understand the doubling back aversion is a problem and can lead them to make bad decisions, they might be able to improve. Do you have recommendations for how decision makers can best avoid doubling back aversion now that they're aware of it?
32:55 Speaker 05 So I think one of the main reasons why, as researchers, we try to study why biases happen, is usually it's in those why answers that the solutions hopefully naturally arise. So as a caveat, I'll say we didn't directly test these solutions, that's for our future work, but building on that idea of waste aversion, that people really don't want to look back at their past efforts and say that they have engaged in wasteful efforts, that they have wasted their time on a certain means, I think people have to redefine for themselves what waste means. Earlier I said that people are very backward focused in defining waste, I think we have
33:38 Speaker 05 to be better at being forward focused and thinking about waste as well. So maybe we don't want to double back because we're going to have to admit to ourselves that we put in a lot of effort to a project that maybe we didn't have to in that particular way, but what we need to be asking ourselves is, do we want to proceed forward and waste more time on the same route, or do we want to take a more efficient route even if that requires us to look to our past and maybe not feel perfectly great about everything we had done at that point? It's related to the broader theme that we all have to be better at accepting that the past may be fixed, but we have full potential to change how we live our lives in the future.
34:23 Speaker 05 And if we can adopt more of that future orientation, I think that's the first step in avoiding doubling back aversion.
34:31 Katy Milkman? I love that. That's a really helpful answer. Thank you so much, Clayton, for taking the time to talk to me today about this fascinating research and for doing this fascinating research. I've had such fun and I know that I've learned a lot and our listeners have too, so really appreciate your time.
34:46 Speaker 05 Thanks so much, Katie. Always fun to talk to you.
34:50 Katy Milkman? Clayton Critcher is a professor of marketing, cognitive science, and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. You can find a link to his paper, co-authored with Christine Cho, called "Doubling Back Aversion: A Reluctance to Make Progress by Undoing It," in our show notes and at schwab.com/choyseology.
35:13 Katy Milkman? Schwab podcasts cover a wide variety of topics, from behavioral economics to market news to golf. The most direct route to find them all is by visiting schwab.com/podcasts.
35:28 Katy Milkman? Doubling back aversion is a bias that we can probably all relate to. For me, it brings up memories of writing a book several years ago and the pain I experienced every time I wrote a first draft of a chapter, only to realize it wasn't very good. The right choice was often to rip it up and start again. But I inevitably wasted hours tinkering with a bad draft before finally doubling back. The deeper I got into the book writing process, though, the better I got at, quote, "killing my darlings," as the expression goes. By the end, it was much easier to spend a day writing a draft of a chapter and resolve myself the next morning to delete it all. My suspicion is that with practice and self-awareness, we can all get better at overcoming the aversion to doubling back.
36:13 Katy Milkman? We probably just need to pay a bit more attention to when we might be experiencing it. Maybe a portfolio adjustment you made last year just doesn't make sense in hindsight. Or the sink you tore out of your bathroom actually looked better than the one you installed. Or maybe it's a report at work that you really need to scrap and start on with fresh eyes. The point is the same. Once you recognize doubling back aversion, you can approach these moments with the awareness that going backwards is often the best way forward.
36:55 Katy Milkman? You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time, I'll speak with Indiana University Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Mary Murphy, about the distinction between a fixed and a growth mindset, and what it takes to foster a culture of growth. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon.
37:50 Speaker 06 For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
Previous Teamwork That Works: What Great Teams Have in Common Next How Mindset Shapes Success Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated