“Are We There Yet?” and the Return-Trip Phenomenon

14 Dec “Are We There Yet?” and the Return-Trip Phenomenon

Some say we experience the return-trip effect because on the way back, we recognize landmarks, which increases the feeling of speed. ©Bruce Berrien, flickr

You’ve been here before: you’ve signed up for a big trip. You’ve lived in a state of anticipation for months, and now you’re finally on your way to a new adventure in a part of the world you’ve never seen before. To get from “here” to “there,” though, you might have to take a flight or two, a boat, a train or maybe even just a lengthy car ride. But whatever the mode of travel, it seems to take forever to arrive.

The opposite of that happens on the way home. Although you take the exact same route and use the exact same transportation methods on the return trip, the time it takes to get back seems to go by much faster—even though it measurably took the same amount.

That’s a phenomenon called the “return-trip effect.” And now, a recent scientific study, published in the journal PLOS ONE on June 10, 2015, provides us with some insight into why we all feel that way.

Optimism makes journeys longer

Paying attention to the here and now makes our lives seem longer. ©Ben Smith, flickr

In the past, it was speculated that the trip home seems shorter because it’s more familiar. On the way back, you begin to recognize landmarks, and that itself might help to increase the feeling of speed. Time appears to slow down when we confront the unfamiliar and whiz by when we’re engaged in routine. This is why we feel time goes by faster as we get older: we face fewer new experiences.

That theory, however, didn’t seem right to Niels van de Ven, a psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He noticed that he experienced the same return-trip effect when taking an airplane both ways—when there are no landmarks to recognize—so he decided to do some experiments.

Ven designed a study (that was published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review in October 2011) using a group of people who were planning to ride their bikes to a fair. He asked each person to ride the same course to the event. Then he split the participants into two groups and asked the riders in one group to come home by the exact, same route. For the other group, he mapped out a different (unfamiliar) course, but one that was equidistant. If the familiarity explanation was right, only the group traveling home by the same route should feel that the trip home was shorter.

Surprisingly, however, what Ven found was that the route didn’t matter. Both groups had the same feeling that the return trip was shorter. He postulated that because people are optimistic when they start to travel and are anxious to arrive, they feel like their outbound trips take longer.

Mindfulness stretches out time

In the new study that was recently published in PLOS ONE, researcher Ryosuke Ozawa of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University in Japan, and colleagues had 20 people in individual sessions sit in a dim room and watch 26-minute movies filmed by an experimenter who held a camera in front of the chest while walking around a city on two different routes. Half of the group viewed an outbound and return trip on the same route; the other half saw videos of two different routes in separate locations.

Finally, it seems, you have arrived, ready to take on a new adventure. ©Zach Dischner, flickr

The study was set up to examine how we perceive time in two ways: as it is going along and what we think retrospectively once a period of time is over. Researchers asked test subjects, who were not allowed to have access to clocks, to tell them every time they thought three minutes had passed. Electrocardiograms were used to monitor the subjects’ hearts to assess whether the autonomic nervous system plays a role in the effect. The team also administered a questionnaire at the end of the movies to see if participants perceived that one trip took longer than the other.

The researchers found that the two groups did an almost equal job at predicting the passing of time during the experiment. But when they recalled the experiment afterward in filling out the after-the-fact questionnaire, the people who did the same outgoing and return trips remembered the second leg to be shorter, while those who took two one-way trips did not experience the phenomenon.

In contrast to Niels van de Ven’s theory, researchers who conducted the new study think that the return trip effect has nothing to do with optimism and pessimism. It might have something to do with hindsight and storytelling—the way people use language to look back on an experience and remember.

Thinking the journey home didn’t take long is probably a good thing. ©Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, flickr

It’s not clear why this happens, though psychologists have several theories, one of which is that the return-trip effect has to do with paying attention to time itself. When you pay more attention to time passing—such as when you’re late, and you keep checking the clock—time seems to take forever. But when other things distract you, time passes quickly. This also happens with memory: when we devote more attention to a period of time (as when we’re anticipating the start of a new adventure), we tend to remember that period of time as being longer.

This leads to an interesting idea about perceived longevity: by being “mindful”—paying attention to the here and now—we can actually slow our brain’s perception of time and make our lives seem longer.

In the end, say most researchers looking at the reasons for this phenomenon, arriving home thinking the journey didn’t take long is a positive feeling. It may be best not to look too deeply into it, or it might go away. In any event, it’s clear that for us, time is always subjective, in ways that have nothing to do with clocks.

Do you have a theory about why the return trip is always “shorter”? Have you experienced the phenomenon? Let us know in the comments section below.

Here’s to your adventures, in whatever corner of the world you find them,

Candy

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Candice Gaukel Andrews

A multiple award-winning and five-time book author and writer specializing in environmental issues and nature-exploration topics, Candice Gaukel Andrews has traveled around the world—from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica and from Greenland’s coasts to Patagonia’s steppes—searching for and telling the stories that express the essence of a place. To read her articles and see samples of her nature photography, visit her website at www.candiceandrews.com and like her Nature Traveler Facebook page at www.facebook.com/naturetraveler.

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