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=Tourism Psychology=

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia " This article is about how motivations, needs, personality, and environmental forces are shaping individual’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors in tourism." Psychology and Tourism  Psychology is a systematic study of human behaviour, which attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the human mental process and behaviour. In tourism, psychology is a scientific study of how individual’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours is influenced by the mechanical forces such as motivation, personality, attitude, needs and environmental factors. As a result of unknown variables (e.g. differences in experiences) in the opening environment, the influences that mechanical forces have on an individual’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors might be malleable. For an instance, if someone live or grow up in an environment where everyone else is a journalist or adventurist, it is plausible that there is a higher chance (when compared to someone who lives or grows up in an environment where they were less exposed to the concept of travel) of this person to become a tourist as constant exposed to an event or object induce liking. Psychologist also argued that, tourist spends his free time in a chosen environment that is somehow different from the one that he is used to be in, thus tourism psychology is more an examination of these tourist’s behavior in an “alternative” environment.

History
Tourism has occurred since Roman times, but however, it only become a major industry since the nineteenth century. Although any psychological theories that seem to explain human behavior can be applied to tourism psychology, the first scholars to consider themselves as a psychologist and interested in visitors and their behavior started in the 1940s to 1950s, where psychologists began to express interests in cross-national and culture study. It had influenced the scholar's ability to examine phenomenon (e.g. student exchange, migration, and tourism) in later study. Subsequently, in the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Wundt looked at folk psychology that focus on studying nature of group and interaction between culture and subculture, which laid the foundation of psychological work on tourism. Later in the early twentieth century, Sir Francis Galton set up an observational laboratory in one of the museums in London to study visitor’s behavior and reaction.

Theories of motivation
In tourism psychology, motivation is interpreted as the reasons for acting in a particular way in the tourist setting.

 Instinct of drive 

Instinct of drive: In 1983, Atkinson came up with a theory about instinct of drive, which suggested that human behaviour was shaped by ten inherited instincts, that were acquisition, construction, curiosity, flight, gregariousness, pugnacity, reproduction, repulsion, self-abasement and self-assertion. This theory described the fact that individuals’ behavior was based upon their instincts, these instincts were significantly influenced the way people do, feel and think.

 Drive reduction theory 

Drive reduction theory: Subsequently, in the same year, Atkinson came up with drive reduction theory to replace instinct of drive. Drive reduction theory recommended that physiological needs produce an aroused tension to the individual, which any psychological imbalances tend to encourage the individual to take actions in order to reduce distasteful tension. Whereas, there are also individuals that like to place themselves in this “tension-arousing” situation. It is plausible that in tourism, individual with this type of psychological traits tend to engage in high-risk activity such as mountain climbing, downhill skiing and bungee-jumping.

 Freud's theory of drive 

Freud’s theory of drive: According to Freud’s theory of drive, human behavior is triggered by four components, which is, source, pressure, aim and object. In this case, the need to satisfy its drive is accountable for the motivation of tourist’s behavior. Firstly, every drive has a source, the source is the somatic excitation (e.g. the pressure that individual received when they couldn’t go travel might accompanying adrenal hormone secretion), which will be escaped as the drive gratified. Secondly, each drive has a pressure, which acts as a pushing character for the action (e.g. saw a historical monument on the textbook would facilitate the urge to travel to that particular place, and the urge here is served as the pressure). Thirdly, each drive has an aim, which is to gratify the drive by having the somatic excitation removed. At this point, individual will perform actions that directly toward this goal (e.g. go out to travel to gain a sense of self-satisfaction). Lastly, each drive has an object, which is an external and physical entity through the drive achieve satisfaction (e.g. the particular place you want to see).

 Maslow's pyramid  Maslow’s pyramid: Maslow’s hierarchy of need acknowledged five elements of needs (physiological, safety, love or relationship, esteem and self-actualisation) that need to be satisfied, which is integrated physiological needs with psychological needs. This hierarchy model progress linearly, individual will not move up to the higher level in the hierarchy until they felt the lower level of need been satisfied, or at least, the most pressing needs in the lower level is satisfied, and the desire to satisfy the “higher-level” needs after the gratification of lower level need is driven by cognitive awareness.

-       Level 1of the Maslow’s pyramid: Satisfaction of the physiological needs.

This is the lower-level needs, which includes the basic human biological need such as sex, food, and shelter. Maslow considered this as the dominant need in the model that will dominate other higher up needs in the hierarchy until is gratified. Consequently, in the case of tourism, individuals go travel may be a result of seeking relaxation. Or as Atkinson argued, tourism is a result of seeking quality gastronomy and accommodation. Namely, individual go to places where can get their physiological need satisfied, and the better quality of food and accommodation, the more motivation the tourist will have to head to this place.

-       Level 2 of the Maslow’s pyramid: Satisfaction of the safety need. This need refers to personal and financial safety, which is highly likely to govern their destination choices. The individual will tend to travel to places where is considered to be no or rarely any threatening stimuli, as this is the human instinct to have self-protection.

-       Level 3 of the Maslow’s pyramid: Satisfaction of the relationships. This need suggests the psychological need of having relationship with others, which might be one of the factors that drive people to go on a journey as tourism in this case not only offer opportunities to develop or maintain existing relationship with families and friends, but also provide opportunities to make new friendship.

-       Level 4 of the Maslow’s pyramid: Satisfaction of the Esteem - a need that can be defined as the self-esteem and social esteem. The individual could build up confidence through all kind of experiences in their journey.

-       Level 5 of the Maslow’s pyramid: Satisfaction of the Self-actualisation. This is considered as the self-fulfillment of the individual, which tourism play a significant role. However, this could be very subjective as there are individual differences, as Shakespeare argued “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes” thus different individual might have their own interpretation of self-actualisation, and being a tourist might be considered as self-fulfilment for some individuals.

Personality
Personality is another key determinant factor to analysis behaviour, according to Decrop personality is "a reflection of a person’s enduring and unique characteristic that urge him or her to respond in persistent ways to recurring environmental stimuli."

Plog created a psychographic network in order to examine the tourists' choice of destination of holiday based upon their natural instinct by measuring their personality dimensions. Subsequently, he established typologies of tourists and categorized them from psychocentrics to allocentrics. Whereas, Psychocentrics displayed "self-inhibited", "nervous" and "non-adventuresome" personality characteristic, which were more likely to choose Coney island as their holiday destination. In addition, Allocentrics expressed "variety seeking", "adventurous" and "confident", which Africa would be their preferred choice of destination. Moreover, He claimed that individual who hold allocentricsc personality trait are more likely to be a traveler, as well as, the majority of people belonged to mid-centric group. People in the mid-centric group neither belong to psychocentrics nor allocentrics, which ended up in places like Hawaii and Europe for their holiday.

The attitude and environmental factor
Forces are categorized into internal and external, the external force was also considered as a drive to human behavior, which was believed that it could influence both involuntary and voluntary behavior.

 Three component of attitude 

Furthermore, with the citation of Dibb's comment: ‘Attitude refers to knowledge and positive or negative feelings about an object or activity. The objects or acts towards which we have attitudes may be tangible or intangible, living or non-living’, Holden argued that the attitude the tourists hold could influence the type of activities they take part in. In addition, Malim and Birch claimed that attitude consist of three components, that is, the cognitive, the affective and the behavioural. The cognitive component is referred to perceptions or personal beliefs, thus this is in regard to subjective value. The affective component involves emotions or feelings that generated by the object, in this case, tourists’ feeling toward the environment ( e.g. an individual who has an exceptional feeling toward historical places, they will then more likely to visit historical places when they had a chance to go travel). The behavioural component is concerned with behavioral intention, which is triggered by the cognitive and affective responses.

 Mode of environmental experience in tourism 

Similarly, Ittleson demonstrated five different but overlapping modes to provide an insight of the interaction between tourist and physical environment. It is believed that these five modes are very subjective as it really depends on how the viewer consider the environment and thus interact with it.

- External: This is referred to the “physical entity” in the nature or environment, as Proshansky suggested, there is a clear demarcation between human and natural environment.

- Setting for action: There are characteristic of the nature that allows individual to have activity depending on it (e.g. beach attract people who love to swim).

- Social system: The environment is a platform for individuals, which allow them to maintain their relationship or social interaction with others. The tourist offers experiences with friends or families that are different from home.

- Emotional territory: There might be some places that individual is emotionally attached to as a result of the earlier visit, and thus these places act as external forces that attract people to revisit.

- Self: The environment might be acknowledged as an inseparable part of self that will spend most of the free time visiting.

Similarly, Pearce emphasized the significance of environmental factor in the social influence facets. He argued that individual tends to perform a similar behavior that is derived from their primary and secondary group to which they belong to, which can be seen in Kelly’s analysis of visitors in the museum. Kelly reported that the motivation behind visitor’s visiting museum behaviour was significantly more driven by the fact that “having been” to a museum rather than “enjoy being in a museum”, this evidence suggested that visitors’ behavior in this case was more induced by group pressure than self-satisfaction.

Cross-cultural study
The cultural study cannot be neglected as it raised concerns about how different cultures could lead to different behavior. On the one hand, some aspect of cultural exchanges (e.g. individual traveling to places with different cultures while holding his own culture) could be worthy or positive. On the other hand, as a result of some poor circumstances, the cultural exchange can be seen as negative. Furnham and Bochner found that tourists travelling in a group could make the ingroup and outgroup problems more salient, such as poor communication, unfriendliness and hostility. According to Pearce, these problems will be amplified when the “technological sophistication and wealth between group is large”. In addition, during cultural exchange, if the social skills and physical behavior of a particular group break the local cultural rules, the privacy invasion occurs.