Why Is The Return Trip Shorter Than The Outward Trip?
If every time you go on vacation you have the feeling that the outward journey is always longer than the return journey you’re not alone.
There is a tendency for people to perceive the return trip as if it lasted somewhat less than the outward journey, although objectively the distances traveled are exactly the same. This is what at least some research seems to indicate.
One of the studies on this topic was carried out in 2011 by a group of Dutch psychologists who began this project when they realized that it was happening to themselves and decided to study what could be called the “return trip effect.” “.
The study, carried out by researchers from Tilburg University, They carried out three experiments to check to what extent this phenomenon is widespread and under what conditions it is produced.
Research
In the first of them, 69 people had to make a round trip and a return trip by bus and then rate on an 11-point scale how long each of these two trips had taken. Even though both routes were equally long, when the outward journey lasted longer than expected, people tended to rate the return trip as if it were shorter.
The second experiment was designed to reveal the effect that whether or not people knew the route of the return trip had on the perception of travel time. For this, several group bicycle outings were scheduled. in which some people returned the way they had gone and another part of the group returned along a different route but of equal length. However, people in both groups tended to perceive the return trip as shorter.
In the third and final experiment, participants did not have to move from where they were but rather watched a video in which a person went to a friend’s house and came back, taking exactly 7 minutes on each of these two trips. Once this was done, the 139 participants were divided into several groups and each of them was asked to estimate the time that had passed during the outward journey or the return journey.
The conclusions of the three studies
While the appreciation of the passage of time was consistent with reality in those people in charge of estimating the duration of the return trip (they estimated an average of 7 minutes in length)people asked about the outward journey tended to add several minutes to the actual elapsed time (they gave an average of 9 and a half minutes). Furthermore, curiously, this effect disappeared in those people who had been told before watching the video that the trips took a long time, since they were more realistic when judging the duration of the return.
Overall, summarizing the findings of the study, the researchers found that the people who participated in the experiments tended to perceive the return trip as 22% shorter
A more recent case
In more recent research whose results have been published in PLOS One, scientists at Kyoto University asked a series of participants to judge the duration of the round trip and the return trip they saw on a video recording. In one of the cases, the participants would see a round trip along the same path, and in the other case they would see a one way trip along the same path that was shown to the people in the first group but the return would go through a completely distinct. However, The durations and distances of the three possible routes were exactly the same
People who saw the round trip via the same route they had the feeling that the return was significantly shorter while the participants in the group in which the return occurred via a different route than the outward route did not notice a difference in duration.
How is this explained?
It is not known exactly what causes the return trip effect, but most likely it has to do with our way of evaluating the passage of time in retrospect, that is, once the return trip has already passed. The Dutch researchers in charge of carrying out 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 conforms more to our expectations.
Another explanation would be that we are more likely to worry more about the passage of time on the way out, because this is associated with the idea of arriving at a place on time, while the same does not usually happen on the return. In this way, the brain allocates more resources to concentrate over the course of minutes and seconds to look for possible shortcuts and thus satisfy certain objectives.
