The well travelled road effect is a
cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, m ...
in which travellers will estimate the time taken to traverse routes differently depending on their familiarity with the route. Frequently travelled routes are assessed as taking a shorter time than unfamiliar routes.
This effect creates errors when estimating the most efficient route to an unfamiliar destination, when one candidate route includes a familiar route, whilst the other candidate route includes no familiar routes. The effect is most salient when subjects are driving, but is still detectable for pedestrians and users of public transport. The effect has been observed for centuries but was first studied scientifically in the 1980s and 1990s following from earlier "heuristics and biases" work undertaken by
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman (; he, דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was award ...
and
Amos Tversky
Amos Nathan Tversky ( he, עמוס טברסקי; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk.
Much of his ...
.
Much like the
Stroop task
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Naming the font color of a printed word is an easier and quicker task if word meaning and font color are congruent. If two words are both printed in red, the average time to say "red" in response to the written word "green" is ...
,
it is hypothesised that drivers use less cognitive effort when traversing familiar routes and therefore underestimate the time taken to traverse the familiar route.
The well travelled road effect has been hypothesised as a reason that self-reported
experience curve effects are overestimated.
See also
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Accuracy and precision
Accuracy and precision are two measures of ''observational error''.
''Accuracy'' is how close a given set of measurements ( observations or readings) are to their ''true value'', while ''precision'' is how close the measurements are to each oth ...
*
Availability heuristic
The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This heuristic, operating on the ...
*
List of cognitive biases
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics.
Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible ...
*
Weber–Fechner law
The Weber–Fechner laws are two related hypotheses in the field of psychophysics, known as Weber's law and Fechner's law. Both laws relate to human perception, more specifically the relation between the actual change in a physical stimulus and ...
References
{{reflist, refs=
[{{cite journal, last1=Allan, first1=Lorraine G., title=The perception of time, journal=Perception & Psychophysics, date=1979, volume=26, issue=5, pages=340–354, doi=10.3758/BF03204158, doi-access=free]
[{{cite journal, last1=Jackson, first1=W. Burke, last2=Jucker, first2=James V., title=An Empirical Study of Travel Time Variability and Travel Choice Behavior, journal=Transportation Science, date=1982, volume=16, issue=4, pages=460–475, doi=10.1287/trsc.16.4.460]
[{{cite journal, last1=Rubia, first1=K, last2=Smith, first2=A, title=The neural correlates of cognitive time management: a review, journal=Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, date=2004, volume=64, issue=3, pages=329–40, pmid=15283476]
[{{cite journal, last1=Zakay, first1=Dan, last2=Fallach, first2=Eli, title=Immediate and remote time estimation — A comparison, journal=Acta Psychologica, date=1984, volume=57, issue=1, pages=69–81, doi=10.1016/0001-6918(84)90054-4, pmid=6507128]
[{{cite journal, last1=Zakay, first1=D, last2=Block, first2=RA, title=Prospective and retrospective duration judgments: an executive-control perspective, journal=Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, date=2004, volume=64, issue=3, pages=319–28, pmid=15283475 , url=http://ane.pl/pdf/6430.pdf, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160524221159/http://ane.pl/pdf/6430.pdf, archive-date=2016-05-24]
Stroop Task-->
Cognitive biases