You go on holiday, come back home and then wonder why you feel that the return trip took less time than the journey to your destination. Scientists believe this effect is only felt retrospectively, meaning when the outing is over. The way people perceive time has a lot of influence on their behavior. So it makes sense to try and understand phenomena such as the ‘return trip effect’ properly.
A new Kyoto University study published on PLOS-One examines the theory in detail. Twenty male participants aged between 20 and 30 years were shown videos shot by a person walking down a street. Some volunteers were given two one-way trips to watch, while others were presented with movies of round-trips. Those who saw the return trip reported that the second leg of the journey took less time to finish even though both walks were completed within the same amount of time.
In order to determine how and when the return trip effect comes into play, the researchers used time estimation in real time and postdictive estimation. The responses of the participants were pretty interesting to note. They were asked to report when they felt 3 minutes had passed since they started watching the videos which were part of the experiment. They were requested to continue doing so at 3-minute intervals.
When watching the footage, the time perception of the test subjects who were shown both types of recordings were found to be pretty much the same and unaffected by the fact that one was a video of two one-way walks, while the other depicted a round-trip. But when asked about the time taken after the clips were watched, or in retrospect, the volunteers who witnessed the round-trip claimed the return journey to have felt shorter.
Thus, the Kyoto University researchers were able to establish that the return trip effect is only felt when one thinks back about it and the the course of a journey.