Many people will continue with a longer, less efficient path to a goal rather than backtrack and take a shortcut — even when the backtracking would save time and effort. A new series of studies published in Psychological Science reveals that this behavior, called “doubling-back aversion,” emerges in both physical and mental tasks, and is driven not by mistaken cost estimates but by how people think about their past and future effort.Psychologists have long studied why people stick with inefficie...