If you’re like most people, at one time or another you’ve turned to a traveling companion and said “It always seems like a shorter trip home than going, doesn’t it?”
And it certainly does. Even from space, where Alan Bean, pilot of the 1969 Apollo 12 lunar module, said “returning from the moon seemed much shorter.”
Some recent research has thrown light (and some shadow) on what people believe about why it happens. A Dutch researcher’s work discounts the theory he at first believed, and work in Japan has suggested you don’t even need to actually take the trip to feel the “return trip effect.”
One popular theory is that it seems shorter because we’re already familiar with the route and can recognize landmarks. According to Niels van de Ven, a Dutch psychologist, “that might help to increase the feeling of speed, of how fast you travel.” But, he pointed out, when you travel by air, there are no landmarks to know.
In his experiments at Tilburg University, he had two groups of people take a bicycle ride to a fair. One group returned by the same route they went; the other group had a different return route. Both groups experienced the “return trip effect,” kind of blowing a hole in the landmark thesis.
He has now thinks it has to do with excess optimism on the way, underestimating the time. When it takes longer, people feel less optimistic, and this makes the return seem shorter.
In the Japanese study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the experimental subjects watched video of a trip. One group watched a round trip on the same route; the other watched two unrelated segments, but with the same length. Participants in the first group found the return trip seemed significantly shorter; the other group didn’t experience that discrepancy.
Because of questions about the set-up of the experiment, the researchers aren’t sure of the validity of their results—except to say that it seems possible to research further without actual travel, as the results were consistent with what actual travelers experienced in other studies.
So: Why does the way home seem shorter? I think it’s just because we’re ready to be there.
Photo: Michiel1972 / Wikimedia
