What's the name of this cognitive bias?

This seems explainable as a simple heuristic — “routes containing retracing-your-steps are likely to be less efficient than other options” — which happens to be wrong in this case.

This seems to me to be a permutation of the sunk cost fallacy. If you retrace your steps, you feel as though you're wasting the effort you took to get there in the first place, even though it's already spent and now it makes sense to go back again.

I share the intuition, by the way.

I think that this should be in the Open Thread.

The slightly longer route also gives you less repetition. If I were in your position, I think I would value it for that — to have more opportunity to make new observations and to practice different actions.

Sounds like a sub-type of question substitution, where you're taking the question "what's the best route to take?" and substituting "what route is simplest?" or maybe substituting the unnatural problem of planning a car trip with more common problem of planning the short-term motion of an object like your hand, or a ball.

Alternately, if you feel more driven by the feeling that it's bad to have to retrace your steps, that would be something more like a "purposefulness drive" (I'm calling it this because of an experiment by Ariely), where it's not so much that you are getting the wrong answer first, it's that you're feeling bad about getting the right answer because part of the trip feels "purposeless." It wouldn't actually be purposeless, the feeling would just come from (again) a sort of question substitution where your brain ignores the big picture when deciding how to feel.

I've noticed something similar which seems to be related not to direction or length but to the shape of the path. I realized this weird one when walking to/from class. There was no direct/crowflies/euclidean route from my residence to the classroom building, but several routes of approximately the same length. I almost always took one there and another one home. Part of this is habit, but I think the other reason is some kind of funnel effect: I prefer open pathways, because I feel like they give me more flexibility, or something, and so in each direction I start with the path that feels the most open, even though later it will narrow. Or something?

I confess I don't understand this very well. I think part of it also has to do with how direct the path is at that point. Like I'm more willing to walk perpendicularly (to the absolute path) at the end of my walk than at the beginning. Both directions aside, I can imagine this manifesting in situations where a brief perpendicularity at the start would actually create a much shorter walk, although I'm not quite that irrational in this instance

It's my understanding that people prefer to go counterclockwise in all sorts of situations, it might just be that.

Do you live in a country where you drive on the right? If so, you're trained to travel on the right which implies counter-clockwise route. Also, most street lights seem to be set to prefer counter-clockwise movement so you'll hit less red lights if you follow this flow.

I identify with this very strongly. It's even stronger for me if the distance I have to travel is already 'extra': e.g. if I forget my train ticket I'd rather take a much slower bus than spend ten minutes walking back to the house because the latter I feel as intensely frustrating.

Its interesting because you don't just feel it at the point of being about to retrace your steps: you're aware of it as part of journey planning.

I have that preference, too. I don't know if it is common enough to have a name.