Why Is the Way Back Always Shorter?
The journey home takes exactly as long as the journey out, and it is over noticeably sooner, which is a strange thing for an hour to do.
You drive out to a village you have never visited, with the dog sitting beside you in the passenger seat. The trip takes an hour and somehow feels like much more. Then you turn round and drive home, along the same roads, in much the same traffic, and the hour is gone before you have finished thinking about lunch. Nothing about the road has changed, and yet only one of the two hours felt long.
The feeling is common enough to have a name: the return trip effect. According to ScienceDaily, a study led by Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, with Michael Roy of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, tested it in 2011. Around 350 people either took a trip by bus or by bicycle, or watched a video of someone taking a bike ride. On average, respondents felt that the return journey went by 22 per cent faster than the outward one. The work was published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
The obvious explanation is familiarity: on the way back you know the route, so perhaps it passes more quickly. But the researchers found that this cannot be the whole story. The return trip effect also appeared when people came back by a different route of the same length. As the ScienceDaily report puts it, you do not need to recognise a route to experience the effect.
Their explanation is about expectations. People often underestimate how long the outward journey will take, so it feels long. Based on that feeling, they expect the return journey to be long as well, and it then turns out to be shorter than they expected. The researchers tested this directly: when one group of participants was told in advance that the upcoming trip would seem long, the return trip effect disappeared.
A later study added a twist. In 2015, Ozawa, Fujii and Kouzaki published a study in the journal PLoS ONE which found that the return trip is felt shorter only postdictively, meaning afterwards, when people look back on it. When time was judged during the trips, there was no difference. The researchers also recorded heart activity and found that the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, the part linked to rest, was related to how people judged the time afterwards.
So the way back is not really shorter, and in the moment it may not even feel shorter. It becomes shorter in memory, measured against the long outward trip that had just disappointed you. Which gives you a small and slightly impractical piece of advice: if you want the drive home to fly by, expect the drive out to be long. And the dog, who has no expectations about timetables at all, probably enjoyed both halves exactly the same.
Sources
Where the facts in this piece come from. Each link leads to another website.
Found an error?
Tell us what is wrong and, if you can, where the correct information is published. We check every report, and when we fix an article we say so here and on the corrections page.
Pass it on
You might also like
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Does Time Move Slower in a Waiting Room?
The clock ticks at the usual speed, but psychologists explain why waiting and boredom make every minute feel stretched.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does a Room Look Different in a Photograph?
A photo records everything from one fixed point, while your eyes see only a small area sharply and your attention picks out what matters, so the picture rarely matches what you saw.
Fiction Tiny Stories
The Tortoise Who Outlasted Three Sofas
He arrived in 1974 as a present for a nine-year-old boy, and has since watched the living room around him be redecorated four times without appearing to notice.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Own Voice Sound So Strange on a Recording?
Hearing yourself played back is like meeting a stranger who has borrowed your words, and part of the reason is that you have spent your whole life listening from inside your own head.