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Spatial categorization and time perception: Why does it take less time to get home?
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Journal of CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY
Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 192 – 198
Short Article
Spatial categorization and time perception: Why does it take less time to get home? Priya Raghubir a,1,2 , Vicki G. Morwitz b,⁎,1 , Amitav Chakravarti c,1,2 a b c
Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 40 West Fourth Street, Suite 809, New York, NY 10012, USA Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 40 West Fourth Street, Suite 807, New York, NY 10012, USA Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 40 West Fourth Street, Suite 817, New York, NY 10012, USA Received 14 August 2009; revised 18 August 2010; accepted 30 August 2010
Abstract This paper identifies a new bias in consumers' time perceptions — consumers perceive a journey from a destination to home to be faster than a trip from home to the same destination. In three experiments we demonstrate that this effect occurs both for short trips and for long trips to and from home. We also show that this effect occurs for other familiar locations in addition to home. We discuss several possible causes for this effect and offer preliminary support for one possible reason that involves differences in how consumers spatially encode “home” vs. 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. © 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Time perceptions; Categorization; Experiments
“The Journey Home is Never Too Long …” Soundtrack, Bombay Dreams. Consumers often rely on their estimates of duration in making a wide range of purchase-related decisions (e.g., Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettman, 2009; Ariely & Loewenstein, 2000; Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993; Robinson & Nicosia, 1991), including which store to visit (Brooks, Kaufmann, & Lichtenstein, 2008; Dellaert, Arentze, & Timmermans, 2008), how frequently to shop, (Roy, 1994; Bawa & Ghosh, 1999), how much time to spend at a store (McDonald, 1994), which line to enter (Hornik, 1984), and what to buy (Bawa & Ghosh, 1999; Fox & Hoch, 2005). This paper ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 212 995 4006. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Raghubir), [email protected] (V.G. Morwitz), [email protected] (A. Chakravarti). 1 Order of authorship is reverse alphabetically and reflects equal contribution by all three authors. 2 Fax: +1 212 995 4006.
identifies a new bias in consumers' duration estimates — a journey from a destination to home feels shorter than the trip from home to the same destination. In three experiments we first demonstrate this “going home effect” for short trips to and from home, then show that it also generalizes to longer trips involving home, and last show that the effect also occurs for a familiar non-home location. We discuss several possible causes for this effect and offer preliminary support for one possible reason that involves differences in how consumers spatially encode “home” vs. 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. Study 1: Short trips to and from home The purpose of Study 1 is to test whether the going home effect occurs for short trips (under 1 h) to and from home.
1057-7408/$ - see front matter © 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2010.08.006
P. Raghubir et al. / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 192–198
Method One hundred and twenty seven undergraduates at a large northwestern university participated in this experiment for partial course credit. Participants were informed that the study was about decisions affecting the environment. They were told, “As you are aware, driving leads to increased pollution levels. However, for trips involving long distances, or those that need to be completed in a hurry, it seems necessary to drive rather than walk or use a bicycle. In this survey, we are estimating the distances between frequently traveled locations.” We manipulated the direction of travel (home to destination/ destination to home) between subjects by asking participants “On average, how many minutes does it take you to get from (your home to this classroom/this classroom to your home).” Participants also indicated their mode of transport (walk/other). Results and discussion A 2 (Direction: home to destination/destination to home) × 2 (mode: walk/not walk) ANOVA on estimated travel times revealed the hypothesized main effect of direction (F(1, 123) = 3.49, p b .05, η2 = .03) and also a main effect of mode of transportation (F(1, 123) = 37.23, p b .001, η 2 = .23). As expected, participants' time estimates were longer for trips from home to the classroom (M = 21.75 min) than for those from the classroom to home (M = 17.13 min). The main effect of mode of transport showed that trips that involved walking took less time than other trips. Study 2: Long trips to and from home Study 2 has two goals. The first is to examine whether the going home effect generalizes to a longer trip (a trip of approximately 375 miles that takes approximately 6 h). The second purpose is to seek preliminary evidence for one possible explanation for the effect. There are many possible reasons why people may feel that trips from home to a destination feel longer than trips from that same destination to home. For example, trips from home to certain non-home destinations (e.g., going to a business meeting location) may be associated with more anxiety and uncertainty, with planning for more time because the route is less familiar, etc. Trips from a non-home destination to home may be more relaxing (e.g. going home to watch TV, relax, and meet family), as well as more familiar because the trip in the opposite direction was recently taken, and more familiar trips may be perceived to take less time. While all these causes remain possible, as a starting point for examining why the going home effect occurs, in Study 2 we include measures that allow us to examine one particular familiarity based explanation (see Fig. 1). Since “home” is a place that is familiar, thoughts about it should come to mind easily, and it should enjoy a rich mental representation. Given that richer experiences contain more memory markers (Ahn, Liu, & Soman, 2009), that familiar objects come to mind easily (Weisbuch & Mackie, 2009), and that objects that come to mind
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easily are perceived as larger (Thomas & Morwitz, 2009; Oppenheimer & Frank, 2008; Alter & Oppenheimer, 2008), “home” could be encoded as a larger spatial area than less familiar “non-home” destinations. This larger spatial encoding could then affect perceptions of the time it takes to travel to, as opposed to from home, and another less familiar destination. Trips to and from “home” and a “non-home destination” comprise three distinct segments: (a) the segment within the “home” area (X in Fig. 1), (b) the segment from the perimeter of the “home” area to the perimeter of the non-home destination area (Y in Fig. 1), and (c) the segment within the non-home destination area (Z in Fig. 1). Study 2 investigates whether perceptions of progress across these three segments during a trip depend on the direction of the trip. In particular, we examine whether the direction of the trip differentially affects time estimates of when people feel that the trip has started, that it is well underway, that they are halfway there, that they are almost there, and that they have arrived. When people are asked to estimate trip duration, they simulate the salient segments of the journey in the sequence that they occur (Matlock, 2004). We do not expect the direction of the trip to differentially influence feelings of when a trip has “started.” This is because the starting point of a trip, irrespective of whether one starts from home or from the destination, is unaffected by the differential spatial encoding of home vs. destination (see Fig. 1). In contrast, we do expect the direction of the trip to differentially affect perceptions of when a trip is “well underway.” Specifically, during the initial stages of the journey (i.e., X or Z), perceived progress towards the destination may be lower for the home-to-destination journey. This could occur because of the larger sub-category size of the home area (i.e., X N Z). It could also occur because as long as travelers encounter familiar landmarks within a home area (e.g., shops, buildings, interstate exits, etc.), they may feel they have not made much progress.3 Therefore, it may take travelers longer to feel that their trip is underway and this feeling may only occur after they cross the perimeter of the “home” area. In contrast, when the journey starts from a less familiar destination, travelers may feel that their trip has commenced closer to the actual start of the journey (e.g., when one leaves the hotel parking lot). This would lead to the perception that the journey is “well underway” earlier in the trip for the destination-to-home journey than the home-to-destination journey. Likewise, we expect that people will feel that they are “halfway there” sooner for a trip from a non-home area to home than for a trip from home to that area. On the trip from home to a non-home destination, the perceived trip time includes time spent in X and Y. Note that although travelers may not feel that they are 3 This could occur because biases in subjective estimates of distance are often rooted in whether the travel points occur within or across the same category (Allen, 1981; Allen & Kirasic, 1985; Irmak, Naylor, & Bearden, 2009) even when the actual distance is held constant (McNamara, 1986). Similar withincategory assimilation and across-category accentuation have been observed for similarity perceptions (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963), perceptions of temperature differences across contiguous days (Krueger & Clement, 1994), and assessments of health-risk (Carvalho, Block, Sivaramakrishnan, Manchanda, & Mitakakis, 2008).
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a “HOME” AREA
“DESTINATION” AREA
X
Y
Z
b
X
Y
Z
HOME
DESTINATION
Feeling of “started”
Feeling of “well underway”
Feeling of “halfway there”
Feeling of “almost there”
DESTINATION
Feeling of “arrived”
HOME
Z
Objective Start Point
Y
X
Objective Halfway Point
Objective End Point
Fig. 1. a: Spatial encoding of “home” vs. “destination”. b: Journey from “home” to “destination” vs. “destination” to “home”.
well underway until they exit area X, they still experience the time in X and count it as part of their trip. Therefore the halfway point for a trip starting from home will be X + (Y/2). In contrast, the halfway point for the trip to home is Z + (Y/2). Since the perimeter of the home area is larger than that for the non-home area (X N Z), travelers would feel it takes longer to reach the halfway point for a trip starting from home than for a trip ending at home. We expect that travelers will feel that they are “almost there” when they near the perimeter of their final destination (X or Z). Given the larger perimeter of the home vs. non-home area (X N Z), travelers may feel that their journey is coming to completion sooner when they travel from a non-home location to home (Z + Y), than when they travel from home to a nonhome destination (X + Y). Finally, we do not expect the direction of travel to differentially affect time estimates of when people feel that have “arrived.” This is because, similar to the start point, the end
point of a journey is also unaffected by the differential spatial encoding of home vs. destination. Method Fifty undergraduates who live in City A4 participated for partial course credit. We asked participants to imagine they were driving from either City A (home) to City B (non-home), or City B (non-home) to City A (home) and were given step-bystep directions and mileage information for each step, as is typical for road maps.5 Participants provided their estimates of how long the trip would take in time, the total distance of the trip, and the specific points in the trip (ranging from 1 to 18) that participants felt that 4 5
Name disguised. From www.mapquest.com.
P. Raghubir et al. / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 192–198 400.0 350.0
Miles Completed
they had completed different journey milestones (when it feels like a trip starts, is well underway, is halfway complete, when one is almost there, and when one has arrived). We converted the ordinal step number into the corresponding cumulative miles covered at the stage of the trip to have a ratio scaled measure that could be compared across the two routes. Participants also indicated their familiarity with the route (M = 4.06; 1 = Not/7 = Very familiar), how often they make long trips (M = 4.60; where Never = 1 and Very often = 7), and the average speed at which they drive (M = 61.08 mph).
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369.2 353.5
345.8
373.1 360.4
304.7
300.0 272.1
250.0 200.0
195.5
150.0 100.0 50.0
48.5 30.2
0.0 Started
Underway *
Halfway **
Almost there
Arrived
Perception of Journey Progress * p < .10, ** p < .05
Results
City A - City B
Confound checks The two groups were matched in terms of route familiarity, experience in driving long routes, and average speed of driving, which were ignored for later analysis. Most participants had a driver's license (95.3%) and owned a car (65.7%). Participants had experience with this drive: 85% had driven between Cities A and B at least once in the last five years, 62% had driven this route three or more times. Manipulation check Participants were more familiar with the streets around City A (M = 4.81) than with the streets around City B (M = 3.09, t = 8.62, p b .001), indicating that the city in which they went to school could be used as the starting “home” or the more familiar location. Perception of actual time taken A one-way ANOVA on participants' estimates of the time to complete the journey showed a significant effect of direction (F(1, 48) = 5.41, p b .05, η2 = .10). Participants estimated that it took longer to drive from the more familiar City A to the less familiar City B (M = 380.21 min), than to the drive from City B to City A (M = 331.73 min). There were no differences in the estimated distance in miles (M = 385.26). Thus, the differences in travel time estimates were not due to differences or biases in distance perceptions. Subjective perception of journey completion A five factor repeated measures ANOVA on the cumulative distance covered at five different points in the journey (started, well underway, halfway, almost there, arrived), including the between-subjects direction factor (City A → City B or City B → City A) revealed a significant main effect of point in the journey (F(4, 192) = 151.52, p b .001, η2 = .76). Not surprisingly, the average number of miles completed increased as the trip progressed (Started = 39.75, Underway = 232.28, Halfway = 324.40, Almost there = 361.04, Arrived = 366.52). There was no significant main effect of trip direction, but the effect of trip progression across the five different points in the journey did, as expected, significantly vary with trip direction (F(4, 192) = 2.54, p b .05, η = .05; see Fig. 2). We next present how the means for cumulative distance for the five points in the trip varied as a function of direction (City A → City B or reverse), and highlight those differences that are significant.
City B to City A
Fig. 2. Estimates of journey progress: Study 2.
Start. There was no significant difference across directions (A → B = 30.23 miles, B → A = 48.53 miles). Well underway. Consistent with our prediction that people perceive that journeys start later when they originate from home because of the familiarity of the local landmarks near home, participants' responses suggested that the number of miles covered for them to perceive that their journey was “well underway” was greater for trips that started from home (City A) (M = 272.13), than for trips that started from a non-home city (City B; M = 195.50). This difference in direction was marginally significant (F(1, 48) = 3.59, p = .06, η2 = .07) based on a one-way ANOVA on the number of cumulative miles associated with feeling that the journey is well underway. Halfway there. The number of miles associated with feeling that one is half-way there varied significantly with trip direction in the predicted manner. Participants' responses suggest that they feel they are “halfway there” at 345.78 miles when traveling from City A → City B. However, when traveling in the opposite direction (City B → City A), their responses suggest they feel they are halfway there after only 304.66 miles (F(1, 48) = 5.66, p b .05, η2 = .11). Almost there. Participants' responses suggest that they felt they were “almost there” earlier in a trip home (City B → City A; M = 304.66) than in a trip away from home (City A → City B; M = 369.19), but the difference was not statistically significant. Arrived. People's responses suggest that they feel like they have “arrived” at their destination after covering 96% of the actual miles in the condition when they are traveling home (City B → City A) vs. 100% when they travel away from home (City A → City B), though the difference was not statistically significant. Discussion This study demonstrates that the going home effect generalizes to longer trips. The results also provide some preliminary support for a possible reason for the effect that is related to differences in how home and the non-home locations
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are categorized. We found that perceptions of progress during the trip varied in a manner consistent with this account, though the effects were only statistically significant for perceptions associated with being well underway, and halfway there. Study 3: Trips to and from a familiar location Our proposed process explanation suggests that the going home effect might not be limited just to actual homes, but may generalize to other familiar locations. One goal of Study 3 is to explore whether the going home effect generalizes to locations that are not home, but are familiar to participants. A second goal of this study is to see if the going home effect varies depending on whether the traveler feels positively or negatively about the trip. Home like other self-relevant concepts is associated with greater attachment (Fedorikhan, Park & Thomson, 2008), and affectively positive destinations are perceived to be closer (Alter & Balcetis, 2010), and affectively positive journeys are perceived to be faster (Sackett, Meyvis, Nelson, Converse, & Sackett, 2010). While trips home may be associated with pleasant thoughts (e.g., looking forward to watching TV, relaxing, and having dinner), trips away from home could sometimes be associated with unpleasant thoughts, worry, or anxiety (e.g., worrying while traveling to a doctor, or to school because of an impending exam). This could be another reason why people feel it takes less time to go home. We investigate this in Study 3 by experimentally manipulating the reason for the trip.
a check of our familiarity manipulation, we asked participants to indicate how familiar they were with the area around the starting point. As checks of our manipulation of trip affect, participants indicated how happy, anxious, and how much they looked forward to going to the destination (1 = Not at all/7 = Very). Finally, participants also indicated their place of residence, length of stay in their current residence, involvement in the study, age, gender, and class standing. Results Manipulation checks A 2 × 2 (Familiarity × Affect) ANOVA on familiarity ratings showed a main effect of familiarity such that the unfamiliar point on the map was seen as less familiar (M = 2.49) than the familiar point on the map (M = 6.00, F(1, 95) = 123.27, p b 0.01, η2 = .56). No other effect was significant. Thus the familiarity manipulation worked as intended. Similar 2 × 2 ANOVAs on the happiness, anxious, and looking forward variables showed a main effect of the trip affect variable. For the affectively positive trip (“meeting a friend for lunch”) participants felt more happy about (M = 4.00), less anxious (M = 2.96), and looked forward more to going to the destination (M = 4.18), compared to the affectively negative trip (“meeting a friend to study for an exam tomorrow”) (Ms = 3.12, 4.10, and 3.35, F(1, 95) = 7.48, 9.81, and 5.61, ps b 0.05, η2s = .07, .09, and .06 respectively). No other effects were significant, thus the trip affect manipulation also worked as intended.
Methods Ninety six undergraduates attending business school at a large northeastern university participated in this experiment for partial course credit. Participants in this study were shown a map taken from Google Maps.6 We pre-selected two points on this map that were 1.75 miles apart with a walking time estimate of 35 min. Participants were asked to estimate the time it would take to walk between the two points, and were not given the distance or walking time information. One of these points was a cross street in an area that participants were likely to be familiar with (i.e., close to the business school, library, dormitories, student apartments, and recreation center). The other point was a cross street in an area that participants were likely to be unfamiliar with (i.e., close to the medical school and school of dentistry). We manipulated the direction of travel by asking participants to estimate the time it would take them to walk either from the familiar spot to the unfamiliar spot, or from the unfamiliar spot to the familiar spot. We manipulated the affect associated with the trip by providing participants with an affectively positive reason (“meeting a friend for lunch”) or an affectively negative reason (“meeting a friend to study for an exam tomorrow”) for the trip. Thus, the current study was a 2 (Familiarity: Familiar vs. Unfamiliar) × 2 (Affect: Positive vs. Negative), fully between-subjects design. Participants were asked to indicate how many minutes they would take to walk from the starting point to the destination. As 6
www.maps.google.com.
Time estimates A 2 × 2 ANOVA on participants' time estimates showed a significant main effect of familiarity (F(1, 95) = 3.72, p b 0.06, η2 = .04) in the predicted direction, with the journey to the familiar location (M = 33.65 min) perceived to take less time than the journey to the unfamiliar location (M = 36.84 min). Thus, this study demonstrates that the going home effect generalizes to familiar non-home locations. No other effect was significant. In particular, affect did not significantly influence the perceived time of the journey. General discussion We demonstrate in three studies that a journey home from a destination is perceived to be faster than a journey from home to the same destination. We demonstrate this going home effect for short and for long trips to and from home, and demonstrate that it also generalizes for a short trip involving a familiar, non-home location. The results also generalize to (a) different modes of transportation: walking (Studies 1 and 3) and road trips (Study 2). While there are many possible causes of this effect, we offer some preliminary evidence consistent with one possible cause of the effect: that a home location is encoded as a larger area than a less familiar location. The effect we demonstrated might be related to other effects noted in previous research. For example, Lee (1970) demonstrated that distances of outward journeys are overestimated, Golledge and Zannaras (1973) showed that distances into town were
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perceived to be longer (see also Briggs, 1972), and Soman and Shi (2003) showed that travel away from a destination decreased perceived travel progress. These findings can be reinterpreted in terms of this familiarity-induced “home” vs. “destination” effect. From a broader perspective, our findings are also consistent with research that shows that spatial features of an environment systematically influence how people experience time (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Boroditsky, 2000). While we provided an initial demonstration of this effect, and offer preliminary support for one possible explanation for the effect, several avenues of research merit investigation in the future. First, future research should more fully investigate why the going home effect manifests. Future research should more fully test whether the effect is at least in part due to differences in how familiar and unfamiliar locations are spatially encoded. Our results for perceived progress only significantly differed in the expected manner for the perceptions associated with points associated with the first half of the trip, but the observed differences for the later parts of the trip were not statistically significant. Thus more research is needed to confirm the spatial encoding explanation and more fully examine the role of familiarity. For example future studies could directly test whether increased familiarity leads to the richer spatial encoding of the home destination. In our studies, our primary dependent measure was always the estimated time to complete a journey. Our proposed process explanation, in contrast, concerns the feeling of reaching home sooner, which is different. While Study 2 does provide some preliminary evidence that feelings of reaching different trip milestones varies with trip direction, we do not have evidence that people feel they reach their destination sooner in trips to vs. from home. Future research should more fully investigate factors that influence the feelings associated with reaching a location and whether those factors are the same or different from those that affect estimates of trip duration. Future research should also investigate other possible causes for the effect. Travelers are likely more knowledgeable about how to get home, and trips away from home may involve more uncertainty, may require more planning, and may generally be more stressful than trips to home. Any of these differences may contribute to the going home effect. In Study 3 we examined in a general fashion whether affect associated with the trip might play a role in driving the effect. Although we did not observe any significant effects of trip affect on perceived duration and although our trip affect manipulation check confirmed that there were differences, it is possible that our manipulation of negative trip affect (traveling to meet a friend to study for an exam) was not negative enough to impact perceived time. Future studies should therefore employ stronger manipulations of positive (e.g., traveling to the movies) vs. negative (e.g., traveling to the hospital to have a painful medical procedure) trip affect, and manipulations related to other related factors (e.g., knowledge about how to get to the destination, planning, and stress) to more fully test their potential roles. Other factors, such as individual-level differences in visual vs. verbal processing strategies (Wyer, Hung, & Jiang, 2008) might also affect time perceptions, and could be an important
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avenue for future research. Likewise, recent research (Sackett et al., 2010; Sellier & Chattopadhyay, 2009) has shown that time estimates can impact how people experience and react to an event. Thus, the logical next step for us would be to see how these differential perceptions of trip time influence people's hedonic evaluations of these trips. It is not clear that faster trip times will necessarily translate into better-liked trips, as is evident from the consumptive value of travel time in recreational trips (Walsh, Sanders, & McKean, 1990).
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Journal of CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY
Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 192 – 198
Short Article
Spatial categorization and time perception: Why does it take less time to get home? Priya Raghubir a,1,2 , Vicki G. Morwitz b,⁎,1 , Amitav Chakravarti c,1,2 a b c
Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 40 West Fourth Street, Suite 809, New York, NY 10012, USA Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 40 West Fourth Street, Suite 807, New York, NY 10012, USA Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, 40 West Fourth Street, Suite 817, New York, NY 10012, USA Received 14 August 2009; revised 18 August 2010; accepted 30 August 2010
Abstract This paper identifies a new bias in consumers' time perceptions — consumers perceive a journey from a destination to home to be faster than a trip from home to the same destination. In three experiments we demonstrate that this effect occurs both for short trips and for long trips to and from home. We also show that this effect occurs for other familiar locations in addition to home. We discuss several possible causes for this effect and offer preliminary support for one possible reason that involves differences in how consumers spatially encode “home” vs. 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. © 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Time perceptions; Categorization; Experiments
“The Journey Home is Never Too Long …” Soundtrack, Bombay Dreams. Consumers often rely on their estimates of duration in making a wide range of purchase-related decisions (e.g., Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettman, 2009; Ariely & Loewenstein, 2000; Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993; Robinson & Nicosia, 1991), including which store to visit (Brooks, Kaufmann, & Lichtenstein, 2008; Dellaert, Arentze, & Timmermans, 2008), how frequently to shop, (Roy, 1994; Bawa & Ghosh, 1999), how much time to spend at a store (McDonald, 1994), which line to enter (Hornik, 1984), and what to buy (Bawa & Ghosh, 1999; Fox & Hoch, 2005). This paper ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 212 995 4006. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Raghubir), [email protected] (V.G. Morwitz), [email protected] (A. Chakravarti). 1 Order of authorship is reverse alphabetically and reflects equal contribution by all three authors. 2 Fax: +1 212 995 4006.
identifies a new bias in consumers' duration estimates — a journey from a destination to home feels shorter than the trip from home to the same destination. In three experiments we first demonstrate this “going home effect” for short trips to and from home, then show that it also generalizes to longer trips involving home, and last show that the effect also occurs for a familiar non-home location. We discuss several possible causes for this effect and offer preliminary support for one possible reason that involves differences in how consumers spatially encode “home” vs. 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. Study 1: Short trips to and from home The purpose of Study 1 is to test whether the going home effect occurs for short trips (under 1 h) to and from home.
1057-7408/$ - see front matter © 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2010.08.006
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Method One hundred and twenty seven undergraduates at a large northwestern university participated in this experiment for partial course credit. Participants were informed that the study was about decisions affecting the environment. They were told, “As you are aware, driving leads to increased pollution levels. However, for trips involving long distances, or those that need to be completed in a hurry, it seems necessary to drive rather than walk or use a bicycle. In this survey, we are estimating the distances between frequently traveled locations.” We manipulated the direction of travel (home to destination/ destination to home) between subjects by asking participants “On average, how many minutes does it take you to get from (your home to this classroom/this classroom to your home).” Participants also indicated their mode of transport (walk/other). Results and discussion A 2 (Direction: home to destination/destination to home) × 2 (mode: walk/not walk) ANOVA on estimated travel times revealed the hypothesized main effect of direction (F(1, 123) = 3.49, p b .05, η2 = .03) and also a main effect of mode of transportation (F(1, 123) = 37.23, p b .001, η 2 = .23). As expected, participants' time estimates were longer for trips from home to the classroom (M = 21.75 min) than for those from the classroom to home (M = 17.13 min). The main effect of mode of transport showed that trips that involved walking took less time than other trips. Study 2: Long trips to and from home Study 2 has two goals. The first is to examine whether the going home effect generalizes to a longer trip (a trip of approximately 375 miles that takes approximately 6 h). The second purpose is to seek preliminary evidence for one possible explanation for the effect. There are many possible reasons why people may feel that trips from home to a destination feel longer than trips from that same destination to home. For example, trips from home to certain non-home destinations (e.g., going to a business meeting location) may be associated with more anxiety and uncertainty, with planning for more time because the route is less familiar, etc. Trips from a non-home destination to home may be more relaxing (e.g. going home to watch TV, relax, and meet family), as well as more familiar because the trip in the opposite direction was recently taken, and more familiar trips may be perceived to take less time. While all these causes remain possible, as a starting point for examining why the going home effect occurs, in Study 2 we include measures that allow us to examine one particular familiarity based explanation (see Fig. 1). Since “home” is a place that is familiar, thoughts about it should come to mind easily, and it should enjoy a rich mental representation. Given that richer experiences contain more memory markers (Ahn, Liu, & Soman, 2009), that familiar objects come to mind easily (Weisbuch & Mackie, 2009), and that objects that come to mind
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easily are perceived as larger (Thomas & Morwitz, 2009; Oppenheimer & Frank, 2008; Alter & Oppenheimer, 2008), “home” could be encoded as a larger spatial area than less familiar “non-home” destinations. This larger spatial encoding could then affect perceptions of the time it takes to travel to, as opposed to from home, and another less familiar destination. Trips to and from “home” and a “non-home destination” comprise three distinct segments: (a) the segment within the “home” area (X in Fig. 1), (b) the segment from the perimeter of the “home” area to the perimeter of the non-home destination area (Y in Fig. 1), and (c) the segment within the non-home destination area (Z in Fig. 1). Study 2 investigates whether perceptions of progress across these three segments during a trip depend on the direction of the trip. In particular, we examine whether the direction of the trip differentially affects time estimates of when people feel that the trip has started, that it is well underway, that they are halfway there, that they are almost there, and that they have arrived. When people are asked to estimate trip duration, they simulate the salient segments of the journey in the sequence that they occur (Matlock, 2004). We do not expect the direction of the trip to differentially influence feelings of when a trip has “started.” This is because the starting point of a trip, irrespective of whether one starts from home or from the destination, is unaffected by the differential spatial encoding of home vs. destination (see Fig. 1). In contrast, we do expect the direction of the trip to differentially affect perceptions of when a trip is “well underway.” Specifically, during the initial stages of the journey (i.e., X or Z), perceived progress towards the destination may be lower for the home-to-destination journey. This could occur because of the larger sub-category size of the home area (i.e., X N Z). It could also occur because as long as travelers encounter familiar landmarks within a home area (e.g., shops, buildings, interstate exits, etc.), they may feel they have not made much progress.3 Therefore, it may take travelers longer to feel that their trip is underway and this feeling may only occur after they cross the perimeter of the “home” area. In contrast, when the journey starts from a less familiar destination, travelers may feel that their trip has commenced closer to the actual start of the journey (e.g., when one leaves the hotel parking lot). This would lead to the perception that the journey is “well underway” earlier in the trip for the destination-to-home journey than the home-to-destination journey. Likewise, we expect that people will feel that they are “halfway there” sooner for a trip from a non-home area to home than for a trip from home to that area. On the trip from home to a non-home destination, the perceived trip time includes time spent in X and Y. Note that although travelers may not feel that they are 3 This could occur because biases in subjective estimates of distance are often rooted in whether the travel points occur within or across the same category (Allen, 1981; Allen & Kirasic, 1985; Irmak, Naylor, & Bearden, 2009) even when the actual distance is held constant (McNamara, 1986). Similar withincategory assimilation and across-category accentuation have been observed for similarity perceptions (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963), perceptions of temperature differences across contiguous days (Krueger & Clement, 1994), and assessments of health-risk (Carvalho, Block, Sivaramakrishnan, Manchanda, & Mitakakis, 2008).
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a “HOME” AREA
“DESTINATION” AREA
X
Y
Z
b
X
Y
Z
HOME
DESTINATION
Feeling of “started”
Feeling of “well underway”
Feeling of “halfway there”
Feeling of “almost there”
DESTINATION
Feeling of “arrived”
HOME
Z
Objective Start Point
Y
X
Objective Halfway Point
Objective End Point
Fig. 1. a: Spatial encoding of “home” vs. “destination”. b: Journey from “home” to “destination” vs. “destination” to “home”.
well underway until they exit area X, they still experience the time in X and count it as part of their trip. Therefore the halfway point for a trip starting from home will be X + (Y/2). In contrast, the halfway point for the trip to home is Z + (Y/2). Since the perimeter of the home area is larger than that for the non-home area (X N Z), travelers would feel it takes longer to reach the halfway point for a trip starting from home than for a trip ending at home. We expect that travelers will feel that they are “almost there” when they near the perimeter of their final destination (X or Z). Given the larger perimeter of the home vs. non-home area (X N Z), travelers may feel that their journey is coming to completion sooner when they travel from a non-home location to home (Z + Y), than when they travel from home to a nonhome destination (X + Y). Finally, we do not expect the direction of travel to differentially affect time estimates of when people feel that have “arrived.” This is because, similar to the start point, the end
point of a journey is also unaffected by the differential spatial encoding of home vs. destination. Method Fifty undergraduates who live in City A4 participated for partial course credit. We asked participants to imagine they were driving from either City A (home) to City B (non-home), or City B (non-home) to City A (home) and were given step-bystep directions and mileage information for each step, as is typical for road maps.5 Participants provided their estimates of how long the trip would take in time, the total distance of the trip, and the specific points in the trip (ranging from 1 to 18) that participants felt that 4 5
Name disguised. From www.mapquest.com.
P. Raghubir et al. / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 192–198 400.0 350.0
Miles Completed
they had completed different journey milestones (when it feels like a trip starts, is well underway, is halfway complete, when one is almost there, and when one has arrived). We converted the ordinal step number into the corresponding cumulative miles covered at the stage of the trip to have a ratio scaled measure that could be compared across the two routes. Participants also indicated their familiarity with the route (M = 4.06; 1 = Not/7 = Very familiar), how often they make long trips (M = 4.60; where Never = 1 and Very often = 7), and the average speed at which they drive (M = 61.08 mph).
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369.2 353.5
345.8
373.1 360.4
304.7
300.0 272.1
250.0 200.0
195.5
150.0 100.0 50.0
48.5 30.2
0.0 Started
Underway *
Halfway **
Almost there
Arrived
Perception of Journey Progress * p < .10, ** p < .05
Results
City A - City B
Confound checks The two groups were matched in terms of route familiarity, experience in driving long routes, and average speed of driving, which were ignored for later analysis. Most participants had a driver's license (95.3%) and owned a car (65.7%). Participants had experience with this drive: 85% had driven between Cities A and B at least once in the last five years, 62% had driven this route three or more times. Manipulation check Participants were more familiar with the streets around City A (M = 4.81) than with the streets around City B (M = 3.09, t = 8.62, p b .001), indicating that the city in which they went to school could be used as the starting “home” or the more familiar location. Perception of actual time taken A one-way ANOVA on participants' estimates of the time to complete the journey showed a significant effect of direction (F(1, 48) = 5.41, p b .05, η2 = .10). Participants estimated that it took longer to drive from the more familiar City A to the less familiar City B (M = 380.21 min), than to the drive from City B to City A (M = 331.73 min). There were no differences in the estimated distance in miles (M = 385.26). Thus, the differences in travel time estimates were not due to differences or biases in distance perceptions. Subjective perception of journey completion A five factor repeated measures ANOVA on the cumulative distance covered at five different points in the journey (started, well underway, halfway, almost there, arrived), including the between-subjects direction factor (City A → City B or City B → City A) revealed a significant main effect of point in the journey (F(4, 192) = 151.52, p b .001, η2 = .76). Not surprisingly, the average number of miles completed increased as the trip progressed (Started = 39.75, Underway = 232.28, Halfway = 324.40, Almost there = 361.04, Arrived = 366.52). There was no significant main effect of trip direction, but the effect of trip progression across the five different points in the journey did, as expected, significantly vary with trip direction (F(4, 192) = 2.54, p b .05, η = .05; see Fig. 2). We next present how the means for cumulative distance for the five points in the trip varied as a function of direction (City A → City B or reverse), and highlight those differences that are significant.
City B to City A
Fig. 2. Estimates of journey progress: Study 2.
Start. There was no significant difference across directions (A → B = 30.23 miles, B → A = 48.53 miles). Well underway. Consistent with our prediction that people perceive that journeys start later when they originate from home because of the familiarity of the local landmarks near home, participants' responses suggested that the number of miles covered for them to perceive that their journey was “well underway” was greater for trips that started from home (City A) (M = 272.13), than for trips that started from a non-home city (City B; M = 195.50). This difference in direction was marginally significant (F(1, 48) = 3.59, p = .06, η2 = .07) based on a one-way ANOVA on the number of cumulative miles associated with feeling that the journey is well underway. Halfway there. The number of miles associated with feeling that one is half-way there varied significantly with trip direction in the predicted manner. Participants' responses suggest that they feel they are “halfway there” at 345.78 miles when traveling from City A → City B. However, when traveling in the opposite direction (City B → City A), their responses suggest they feel they are halfway there after only 304.66 miles (F(1, 48) = 5.66, p b .05, η2 = .11). Almost there. Participants' responses suggest that they felt they were “almost there” earlier in a trip home (City B → City A; M = 304.66) than in a trip away from home (City A → City B; M = 369.19), but the difference was not statistically significant. Arrived. People's responses suggest that they feel like they have “arrived” at their destination after covering 96% of the actual miles in the condition when they are traveling home (City B → City A) vs. 100% when they travel away from home (City A → City B), though the difference was not statistically significant. Discussion This study demonstrates that the going home effect generalizes to longer trips. The results also provide some preliminary support for a possible reason for the effect that is related to differences in how home and the non-home locations
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are categorized. We found that perceptions of progress during the trip varied in a manner consistent with this account, though the effects were only statistically significant for perceptions associated with being well underway, and halfway there. Study 3: Trips to and from a familiar location Our proposed process explanation suggests that the going home effect might not be limited just to actual homes, but may generalize to other familiar locations. One goal of Study 3 is to explore whether the going home effect generalizes to locations that are not home, but are familiar to participants. A second goal of this study is to see if the going home effect varies depending on whether the traveler feels positively or negatively about the trip. Home like other self-relevant concepts is associated with greater attachment (Fedorikhan, Park & Thomson, 2008), and affectively positive destinations are perceived to be closer (Alter & Balcetis, 2010), and affectively positive journeys are perceived to be faster (Sackett, Meyvis, Nelson, Converse, & Sackett, 2010). While trips home may be associated with pleasant thoughts (e.g., looking forward to watching TV, relaxing, and having dinner), trips away from home could sometimes be associated with unpleasant thoughts, worry, or anxiety (e.g., worrying while traveling to a doctor, or to school because of an impending exam). This could be another reason why people feel it takes less time to go home. We investigate this in Study 3 by experimentally manipulating the reason for the trip.
a check of our familiarity manipulation, we asked participants to indicate how familiar they were with the area around the starting point. As checks of our manipulation of trip affect, participants indicated how happy, anxious, and how much they looked forward to going to the destination (1 = Not at all/7 = Very). Finally, participants also indicated their place of residence, length of stay in their current residence, involvement in the study, age, gender, and class standing. Results Manipulation checks A 2 × 2 (Familiarity × Affect) ANOVA on familiarity ratings showed a main effect of familiarity such that the unfamiliar point on the map was seen as less familiar (M = 2.49) than the familiar point on the map (M = 6.00, F(1, 95) = 123.27, p b 0.01, η2 = .56). No other effect was significant. Thus the familiarity manipulation worked as intended. Similar 2 × 2 ANOVAs on the happiness, anxious, and looking forward variables showed a main effect of the trip affect variable. For the affectively positive trip (“meeting a friend for lunch”) participants felt more happy about (M = 4.00), less anxious (M = 2.96), and looked forward more to going to the destination (M = 4.18), compared to the affectively negative trip (“meeting a friend to study for an exam tomorrow”) (Ms = 3.12, 4.10, and 3.35, F(1, 95) = 7.48, 9.81, and 5.61, ps b 0.05, η2s = .07, .09, and .06 respectively). No other effects were significant, thus the trip affect manipulation also worked as intended.
Methods Ninety six undergraduates attending business school at a large northeastern university participated in this experiment for partial course credit. Participants in this study were shown a map taken from Google Maps.6 We pre-selected two points on this map that were 1.75 miles apart with a walking time estimate of 35 min. Participants were asked to estimate the time it would take to walk between the two points, and were not given the distance or walking time information. One of these points was a cross street in an area that participants were likely to be familiar with (i.e., close to the business school, library, dormitories, student apartments, and recreation center). The other point was a cross street in an area that participants were likely to be unfamiliar with (i.e., close to the medical school and school of dentistry). We manipulated the direction of travel by asking participants to estimate the time it would take them to walk either from the familiar spot to the unfamiliar spot, or from the unfamiliar spot to the familiar spot. We manipulated the affect associated with the trip by providing participants with an affectively positive reason (“meeting a friend for lunch”) or an affectively negative reason (“meeting a friend to study for an exam tomorrow”) for the trip. Thus, the current study was a 2 (Familiarity: Familiar vs. Unfamiliar) × 2 (Affect: Positive vs. Negative), fully between-subjects design. Participants were asked to indicate how many minutes they would take to walk from the starting point to the destination. As 6
www.maps.google.com.
Time estimates A 2 × 2 ANOVA on participants' time estimates showed a significant main effect of familiarity (F(1, 95) = 3.72, p b 0.06, η2 = .04) in the predicted direction, with the journey to the familiar location (M = 33.65 min) perceived to take less time than the journey to the unfamiliar location (M = 36.84 min). Thus, this study demonstrates that the going home effect generalizes to familiar non-home locations. No other effect was significant. In particular, affect did not significantly influence the perceived time of the journey. General discussion We demonstrate in three studies that a journey home from a destination is perceived to be faster than a journey from home to the same destination. We demonstrate this going home effect for short and for long trips to and from home, and demonstrate that it also generalizes for a short trip involving a familiar, non-home location. The results also generalize to (a) different modes of transportation: walking (Studies 1 and 3) and road trips (Study 2). While there are many possible causes of this effect, we offer some preliminary evidence consistent with one possible cause of the effect: that a home location is encoded as a larger area than a less familiar location. The effect we demonstrated might be related to other effects noted in previous research. For example, Lee (1970) demonstrated that distances of outward journeys are overestimated, Golledge and Zannaras (1973) showed that distances into town were
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perceived to be longer (see also Briggs, 1972), and Soman and Shi (2003) showed that travel away from a destination decreased perceived travel progress. These findings can be reinterpreted in terms of this familiarity-induced “home” vs. “destination” effect. From a broader perspective, our findings are also consistent with research that shows that spatial features of an environment systematically influence how people experience time (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Boroditsky, 2000). While we provided an initial demonstration of this effect, and offer preliminary support for one possible explanation for the effect, several avenues of research merit investigation in the future. First, future research should more fully investigate why the going home effect manifests. Future research should more fully test whether the effect is at least in part due to differences in how familiar and unfamiliar locations are spatially encoded. Our results for perceived progress only significantly differed in the expected manner for the perceptions associated with points associated with the first half of the trip, but the observed differences for the later parts of the trip were not statistically significant. Thus more research is needed to confirm the spatial encoding explanation and more fully examine the role of familiarity. For example future studies could directly test whether increased familiarity leads to the richer spatial encoding of the home destination. In our studies, our primary dependent measure was always the estimated time to complete a journey. Our proposed process explanation, in contrast, concerns the feeling of reaching home sooner, which is different. While Study 2 does provide some preliminary evidence that feelings of reaching different trip milestones varies with trip direction, we do not have evidence that people feel they reach their destination sooner in trips to vs. from home. Future research should more fully investigate factors that influence the feelings associated with reaching a location and whether those factors are the same or different from those that affect estimates of trip duration. Future research should also investigate other possible causes for the effect. Travelers are likely more knowledgeable about how to get home, and trips away from home may involve more uncertainty, may require more planning, and may generally be more stressful than trips to home. Any of these differences may contribute to the going home effect. In Study 3 we examined in a general fashion whether affect associated with the trip might play a role in driving the effect. Although we did not observe any significant effects of trip affect on perceived duration and although our trip affect manipulation check confirmed that there were differences, it is possible that our manipulation of negative trip affect (traveling to meet a friend to study for an exam) was not negative enough to impact perceived time. Future studies should therefore employ stronger manipulations of positive (e.g., traveling to the movies) vs. negative (e.g., traveling to the hospital to have a painful medical procedure) trip affect, and manipulations related to other related factors (e.g., knowledge about how to get to the destination, planning, and stress) to more fully test their potential roles. Other factors, such as individual-level differences in visual vs. verbal processing strategies (Wyer, Hung, & Jiang, 2008) might also affect time perceptions, and could be an important
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avenue for future research. Likewise, recent research (Sackett et al., 2010; Sellier & Chattopadhyay, 2009) has shown that time estimates can impact how people experience and react to an event. Thus, the logical next step for us would be to see how these differential perceptions of trip time influence people's hedonic evaluations of these trips. It is not clear that faster trip times will necessarily translate into better-liked trips, as is evident from the consumptive value of travel time in recreational trips (Walsh, Sanders, & McKean, 1990).
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