THAT'S THE WHY:"Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" It's a familiar chant that is no doubt ringing in chorus from the backs of cars this summer as excited children – and older passengers – channel their excitement or boredom on long journeys.
But has it ever struck you that the trip home from a holiday or a new destination can feel much shorter than the outbound journey, even though you are covering the same distance? Why is that?
There are plenty of possible reasons that sound intuitively plausible: perhaps your frame of mind is different on the way home, or maybe the kids are asleep and your
attention is not focused on the need to get there quickly.
But a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychologyearlier this year looked more rigorously at this bias in time perception.
The experiments suggest that the phenomenon happens not only on long trips to and from from home,
but on shorter excursions too, and also on journeys to a familiar destination that isn’t home.
The study authors, from Leonard N Stern School of Business at New York University, raise the possibility that it could have to do with how we spatially encode “home” versus a destination.
“Since home is extremely familiar it enjoys a rich mental representation, and therefore, consumers may encode it as a relatively larger geographical area than the less familiar destination.
“We offer preliminary evidence that this can lead to a directional asymmetry in their feelings of trip progress.”
So are we there yet?
