Rewriting Aversion
I just read about this cool psychological effect: the doubling-back effect.
Cho and Critcher (2025):
Consider a New Yorker flying home from San Francisco with a stopover in Los Angeles. After landing in Los Angeles, they see their flight to New York is severely delayed. The airline gives them the option to switch to reroute through Denver, which would get them to New York three hours earlier. Although several previously identified psychological forces may discourage switching from the status quo, we suspect many travelers would take this time-saving detour.
Now imagine a twist. Instead of an alternate routing through Denver, the airline offers the opportunity to fly back to San Francisco before continuing nonstop to New York. Even if this change would also save three hours, we suspect enthusiasm for it would be lower. We propose this is because the option involves doubling back: the deletion or undoing of progress already made (flying back to San Francisco) such that one then has more of a journey to complete (the entire trip from San Francisco to New York instead of just the remaining portion). We propose people display doubling-back aversion, a preference to avoid doubling back even when doing so is a more efficient means to an end. Beyond documenting doubling-back aversion, we test whether each component of doubling back contributes to this effect.
I suspect this affects our writing practices. Rewriting aversion is what happens when we avoid rewriting research articles or books even if it is more efficient to rewrite.
Suppose you have two options for writing a book.
Option 1. You spend two years writing a first draft of a book. Major revisions are kept to 10% of the book’s material, and the final draft is complete three months later.
Option 2. You spend three months writing a first draft of a book. You have to completely revise or rewrite 60% of the book, and the final draft is complete one year later.
Suppose the books are of the exact same quality. Option 2 is the better option because you get done one year earlier with no trade-off in quality. Though because Option 2 involves substantial rewriting, there will likely be some aversion to it.
Or so I hypothesize.