New Research Explains Billable Hour's Staying Power!

Well, not exactly, but this article in the Telegraph discusses an experiment exploring humans' preference for a familiar (though less efficient) path, and found:

most of us are happy to play follow-my-leader, even if we aretrailing after someone who does not know where they are going andtaking the most meandering route.  Even more striking, even when we are shown a faster route, we prefer tostick with the old one and tell others to take the long road too, afinding that could have lethal implications when it comes to evacuatinga building or ship in an emergency.

In the study, participants were led from one room to another. When asked to return to the first room, almost all took the familiar path back, even when they were aware of a shorter path:

All but one person took the route they had beenled. What we were surprised by was how strong this effect was, evenwhen the alternative route was much shorter .... They preferred the long route even when the experimenter had drawnattention to the alternative route, or when the experimenter took thelong route solely to pick up a fallen poster, eliminating thepossibility that participants thought the experimenter had a good, butunknown, reason to take the long route. By askingparticipants to collect the next guinea pig in the experiment, thescientists observed that each person in the chain copied the route ofthe participant before them: a simple tradition that meant thealternative route was never discovered.

Interesting food for thought, don't you think?