"Why haven't we arrived yet?" "How far is it?" "Why does the road take so long?"... When traveling, you may have had the same experience. When you go there, you feel that the destination is close in front of you, but it feels out of reach in time. And what’s even weirder is that even though the route is the same, the return trip home always feels much faster than the way there, as if I’ve taken a shortcut.

This wonderful phenomenon of "a long way to go, a short way back" is probably a good sign that you will experience a wonderful holiday trip~

What is the feeling of "the journey is far away but the journey back is near"?

When you go to a strange place and then come back,Despite walking the same distance, the time it takes to get back always seems to be much shorter than the original. This peculiar feeling has a professional explanation, called the return trip effect.

It means that even though objectively the distance between the outbound and return journey is the same, subjectively we think that the distance to the destination is longer than the distance back from the destination.

Many scientists have also become keenly interested in this strange phenomenon that often occurs in life. A research experiment published by Ryosuke Ozawa of Kyoto University in the journal PLOS ONE found that the return effect does exist. It does not affect the time mechanism itself, but our perception of time afterwards.

The experimenters divided 20 participants into two groups and watched three "hiking" videos of equal length and distance (26.3 minutes, 1.7 kilometers). Video 1 is the route from "S" to "E", Video 2 is the return trip from "S" to "E", and Video 3 is a completely different route. In the experiment, 10 participants formed a round-trip group and watched Video 1 or 2 at a time. Another group consisted of another 10 participants who watched videos 2 or 3 at a time.

Through subsequent scoring of participants' feedback, it was found that although at an objective level, the time and distance of the video were exactly the same, participants who watched the round-trip video believed that the return video took less time.

What causes the "return effect" to occur?

1. Familiarity

In an article in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, University of Miami psychologist Zoey Chen proposed a familiarity-related explanation for the return effect.

With the blessing of experience, we believe that the development of everything will proceed smoothly and in a straight line. And when we do something for the first time, because of lack of experience, we feel uneasy and think that the next thing may be a curve with episodes.

This results in people feeling that it takes less time to engage in familiar things than in unfamiliar things.When we travel to a strange place, we tend to feel that something unexpected has happened because of the unknown. When we return, because we are familiar with the route, we have the illusion that time has gone faster.

2. Anticipation establishment

Although the return trip effect may indeed be related to familiarity, many studies have found that people still experience the "return trip effect" even when the round-trip routes are completely different.

A study published in the journal Psychological Economics Bulletin and Reviews found that 97 college students rode bicycles to a forest clearing. Two hours later, a third of the group returned from the same route, while the remainder returned from a different route of the same length.

Although all routes took only 35 minutes, during the final actual ride the researchers found that "No matter which route the students chose, the return route reported that it was nearly 22% shorter than the initial trip."

Psychologists believe that the occurrence of this phenomenon is likely to be related to people's emotions and "expectations." People often underestimate the time it takes to do something.When embarking on a strange journey, we will be affected by the overall expectations, curiosity, anxiety, impatience and other emotions about the trip, and we will have the illusion that "an hour's journey is much longer than usual". This is the establishment of expectations.

On the return trip, because we know that the destination is home, and in most cases we are not too excited about "going home". This allows us to experience real time with a more stable mentality, so there will be deviations from previous expectations. On the one hand, we cognitively feel that "time may be very long", and on the other hand, the perception of real time returns to normal levels due to the elimination of emotional effects, which results in the emergence of the return trip effect.

Additionally, the researchers noted that emotions and expectations can even sometimes reverse the effects of the return trip effect. This is because anticipation increases arousal and attention, giving the illusion of extended time. So if you are not interested in the next trip at all, and even want to go home quickly, then you are likely to experience the flip return effect of "short way to go, long way back".

It seems that although the return effect during travel can sometimes be very tiring, it also means that we have high expectations and interest in the entire next journey. So, to a certain extent, if you experience the return effect during your next trip, it most likely means that you will have a wonderful and happy holiday life.

References

[1]Chen,Z.,Hamilton,R.,&Rucker,D.D.(2020).Arewethereyet?Ananticipationaccountofthereturntripeffect.SocialPsychologyandPersonalityScience.Advanceonlinepublication.DOI:10.1177/1948550620916054

[2]OzawaR,FujiiK,KouzakiM(2015)Correction:TheReturnTripIsFeltShorterOnlyPostdictively:APsychophysiologicalStudyoftheReturnTripEffect.PLOSONE10(7):e0133339.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133339