The trip to an unfamiliar place can feel long, while the journey home seems much quicker, even when distance and actual travel time are identical. This subjective difference is often called the return trip effect.
Three studies published in 2011 observed the effect during bus travel, cycling and videos of journeys. The researchers initially considered route familiarity, but the return still felt shorter when participants took a different route of equal length. Expectations predicted the difference more clearly. When the outward trip lasted longer than expected, people adjusted their estimate for the return. If the return did not exceed that new benchmark, it seemed relatively short in retrospect.
This does not mean the brain contains a clock that always distorts return journeys. Research published in 2020 proposed that stronger anticipation of the destination on the outward leg can also lengthen subjective time. Route familiarity, events along the way, emotion, and whether duration is judged during the trip or recalled afterwards can all matter. Real return journeys may also encounter different traffic, so feeling shorter does not show that a trip was actually faster.
The safer conclusion is that time perception compares a journey with expectations and with what has just happened. The return trip effect is a conditional average tendency, not a rule for every round trip, and it does not show that memory of the outward journey is defective.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3179583/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550620916054
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