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The Well-Travelled Road Effect: Why Familiar Routes Fly By
What a simple cognitive bias teaches about how to live our lives.
Here’s a common experience for motorists: you are driving somewhere new and you’re late.
As you drive down unfamiliar roads it seems that everything is conspiring against you: other cars, the road-layout, the traffic lights and even suicidal cyclists. You know it’s only a few more miles, but it seems to be taking for-e-e-e-e-e-ever.
Psychologically there are all sorts of things going on to make the journey seem longer than it really is, but let’s just isolate one of those: the unfamiliarity of the route.
Unknown routes peak our curiosity; they are filled with new names, landscapes and landmarks, all of which attract the interest. The fact that our attention is engaged with all this newness has a subtle effect on how much time we think has passed.
To see why, let’s take the opposite perspective for a moment.
Think about driving a route that’s very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it’s easy to zone out from the actual (真题中改写为lose concentration on the)driving and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that the trip has taken less time than it actually has.
This is the well-travelled road effect: people tend to underestimate the time it takes to travel a familiar route. The corollary is that unfamiliar routes seem to take longer.
The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. When we travel down a well-known route, because we don’t have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can’t remember the journey well because we didn’t pay much attention to it. So we assume it was proportionately shorter
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