If every time you go on holiday you have the feeling that the outward journey is always longer than the return , you are not alone. There is a tendency for people to perceive the return journey as being somewhat shorter than the outward journey, even though objectively the distances travelled are exactly the same. This seems to be indicated, at least, by some research.

The “return trip effect”: shorter return trips

One of the studies on this topic was conducted in 2011 by a group of Dutch psychologists who started this project when they realized what was happening to them and decided to study what could be called the “return trip effect”. The study, carried out by researchers from the University of Tilburg, conducted three experiments to test the extent to which this phenomenon is widespread and under what conditions it occurs.

Research

In the first of these, 69 people had to make one outward and one return trip by bus and then score on an 11-point scale how long each of these two trips had been made. Even though both trips were equally long, when the outward journey took longer than expected, people tended to rate the return as being shorter.

The second experiment was designed to reveal the effect on the perception of travel time whether or not people knew the route of the return trip. To do this, several group outings were scheduled on bicycles, in which some people returned the way they had gone and another part of the group returned by a different route but of equal length. However, people in both groups tended to perceive the return trip as shorter.

In the third and last experiment, participants did not have to move from where they were but watched a video in which a person went to a friend’s house and returned, taking exactly 7 minutes on each of these two trips. Once this was done, the 139 participants were divided into several groups and each was asked to estimate the time they had spent on the outward or return trip.

The conclusions of the three studies

While the appreciation of the passage of time was in line with reality in those people in charge of estimating the duration of the return trip (they estimated an average of 7 minutes in duration) , people asked about the outward trip tended to add several minutes to the actual time elapsed (they gave an average of 9 and a half minutes). Interestingly, this effect disappeared in those people who had been told before watching the video that the trips were quite long, as they were more realistic in judging the length of the return trip.

Overall, summarizing the study’s findings, the researchers found that people who participated in the experiments tended to perceive the return trip to be 22% shorter .

A more recent case

In more recent research, the results of which have been published in PLOS One, scientists from Kyoto University asked a number of participants to judge the length of the outward and return journeys they saw on a video recording. In one case, the participants would see a return trip along the same route, and in the other case they would see a return trip along the same route that was shown to the people in the first group but the return trip would go through a completely different route. However, the durations and distances of the three possible routes were exactly the same .

People who saw the return trip by the same route t felt that the return trip was significantly shorter , while participants in the group where the return trip was by a different route than the trip did not notice a difference in duration.

How do you explain this?

We don’t know exactly what the return trip effect is, but it most likely has to do with our way of assessing the passage of time in retrospect, i.e. after the return trip has already taken place. The Dutch researchers in charge of the first experiments believe that this curious phenomenon has to do with the negative appreciation of a first trip that is too long, which makes the return seem shorter by comparison as it is more in line with our expectations.

Another explanation would be that we’re more likely to worry about the passage of time on the way out , because it’s associated with the idea of arriving on time at a place, while the same doesn’t usually happen on the way back. In this way, the brain devotes more resources to concentrate on the course of minutes and seconds in order to look for possible shortcuts and thus satisfy certain objectives.

Bibliographic references:

  • Ozawa R, Fujii K and Kouzaki M (2015). The Return Trip Is Felt Shorter Only Postdictively: A Psychophysiological Study of the Return Trip Effect. PLOS One, 10(6), e0127779
  • Van de Ven, N., Van Rijswijk, L. and Roy, M. M. (2011). The return trip effect: Why the return trip often seems to take less time. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), pp. 827 – 832.