Routledge Handbook of Social Psychology of Tourism

Dogan Gursoy, Sedat Çelik, Dogan Gursoy, Sedat Çelik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367752873
• eBook ISBN: 9781000579796
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The impacts of tourism, an increasingly crucial area of study amongst researchers, are primarily investigated through economic, socio-cultural or environmental perspectives. The social psychological effects of tourism have not been adequately researched despite often being much more important for many destinations, especially where conflicts among different stakeholders exist. This book investigates the social psychological effects of tourism within the scope of social psychology theory.

This book introduces the concept of social psychology, as distinct from psychology and sociology, and its relationship to tourism, examines tourism within various theoretical frameworks, e.g. career ladder theory and Maslow's 7 hierarchy, explores the ways in which tourism changes attitudes and finally investigates social psychological issues in tourism business.

It is an important resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and relevant practitioners in the field of tourism, and in some cases for a broader public in the field of social psychology.

1 Psychology, Sociology, and Social Psychology

Hacer Harlak

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161868-1

Introduction

Three friends went to Rome to spend their holiday. They had booked an economic hotel room for three persons for five nights by using one of the online internet booking sites. The hotel was not far from the city center by bus. It was an old apartment transformed into tourist accommodation. There was no reception, room service, restaurant, etc. They found the keys as written in the directions in the message they had received from the booking site. They went into the room. It was a large room with only one small window. There were three single beds and simple furniture. However, as soon as they entered the room they felt a bad smell and when they opened the bathroom door the smell became unbearable. One of them called the contact number and asked for a solution for the bad smell to the woman on the phone. The woman said that a plumber would repair the washbasin the next morning. However, the next day nobody arrived to repair it, and they had to sleep with that disgusting smell. The next morning, they called the contact person again. In the daytime, they were out to visit tourist attractions in Rome but when they arrived at the room in the night the same bad smell continued. One of them proposed to change the hotel, while the other two rejected the idea because it was high season and said that it would be very difficult to find an available room for a low price. They managed to spend five nights despite the horrible smell in the room.

Many travelers with a low budget could have experienced a scenario similar to the one above. Incidents like this and somewhat different others could be analyzed from various aspects. An economist, a psychologist, a sociologist, a social psychologist, and other social scientists can have diverse perspectives for various situations in which such social interactions occur. Focusing on psychology, sociology, and social psychology, this chapter deals with the theoretical and methodological approaches of the three disciplines to understand and explain human behavior and relationships. Each area has its collection of topics, perspectives, history, and research methodologies. In this chapter, first, the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and then social psychology will be introduced. In the final section, they will be compared and contrasted with one another in relation to some aspects.

Definition, Main Concerns, and Subject Areas of Psychology

Many people ask such questions as what kind of relations are there between the human brain and behavior? Why do we dream? Do animals have intelligence? Why do many people become nervous before an important exam? Why do some people hurt themselves? How does a newborn human baby who has a 3.5 kilogram weight and 48–50 centimeters height and is not able to speak and walk become a capable person who can do almost whatever she/he wants? How can we learn anything? How do we remember many things but sometimes forget some important ones? How do we make decisions? etc. You can add your questions to the list. These questions are not new. Namely, many thinkers asked them and more others similar to them before. However, searching for scientifically valid answers to these questions is relatively new.

The questions above are examples of which psychology researchers deal with for a long time. Psychology as a scientific area is defined as “the scientific investigation of mental processes (thinking, remembering, feeling, etc.) and behavior” (Griggs, 2012; Kowalski & Westen, 2010). Behaviors are generally defined as observable responses or actions to the environment. They vary from smiling, speaking loudly, running, reading a poem, etc. to hitting someone, talking in sleep, complaining about something, crying, etc. Mental processes include cognitive processes such as thinking, remembering, information processing, and affective processes such as feeling sad, joy, angry, or anxious.

Psychologists are interested in both the nature of specific behaviors, emotions, and mental processes and their underlying causes. Many psychological theories were developed to explain behavior and related processes by utilizing psychological research methods ranging from experiments carried out with limited participants in laboratory settings to surveys with many participants from various social backgrounds.

Psychology is a social science as well as natural science. Many psychology studies focus on human beings; however, there are many investigations on animal behavior too. Psychologists do research on the nature of humans and animals which questions the effects of biological factors such as the roles of evolutionary processes, physiological processes (inner states, brain activation, nervous system, etc.) on behavior, sensation, affection, and mental health. Also, they study the environmental or sociocultural effects (child-rearing practices, social norms, and beliefs) on behavior.

Let us consider psychological research on stress. Stress is generally defined as “the response to the events that threaten or challenge a person” (Feldman, 1997, p. 307). The reasons for stressful experiences of a person might be various such as unemployment, serious health problems, important life events (divorce, car accident, losing a beloved one, moving to another country, etc.), or other real-life situations such as going for a holiday and asking for a room change at a hotel, like in the example at the beginning of this chapter which seems not as important as or as negative as “big” life events. When a person is under stress, several physiological reactions and changes are experienced in the body. A psychology researcher (e.g., a neuropsychologist) is concerned with exploring these physiological processes or mechanisms to explain the behavior or the relations between the mechanisms and behavior. However, another psychologist (e.g., personality psychologist) concentrates on the effects of personality characteristics on behavior to explain why there are individual differences in reactions to stressful situations. Their theories, research methods, and levels of explanations would differ from one another to some degree.

To gain an understanding of the main focus of psychology we can look closely into the history of psychology.

Major Developments in Psychology from a Historical Perspective

In psychology textbooks, the following phrase written by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (Ebbinghaus, 1908) is frequently quoted: “psychology has a long past but a short history.” Namely, the questions and answers which exist even in today’s psychology were argued by ancient philosophers (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates) and later by others (e.g., R. Descartes, T. Hobbes, I. Kant, J. Locke) long before psychology has been founded as an institutionalized scientific discipline. However, the beginning of psychology that many textbooks seem to agree on is 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded a laboratory in Leipzig, although recent studies showed that there were early developments in Germany before that (see Greenwood, 2015).

Table 1.1 Milestones in the History of Psychology

F.J. Gall – 1st volume of Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux (Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System), 1810 J. Müller – Handbüch des Physiologie des Menschen (Handbook of Human Physiology), 1834 C. Darwin – On the Origin of Species, 1859 and The Descent of Man, 1871 G. Fechner – The Elements of Psychophysics, 1860 Wundt – Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1873 E. Kraepelin – Compendium der Psychiatrie, 1883 H. Spencer – Principles of Psychology, 1855 F. Brentano – Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1874 W. James – What is an Emotion? 1884 and The Principles of Psychology, 1889 H. Ebbinghaus – On Memory, 1885 O. Külpe – Outlines of Psychology, 1893 W. Wundt – Outlines of Psychology, 1897 E.B. Titchener – The Postulates of a Structural Psychology, 1898 E.L. Thorndike – Animal Intelligence, 1898

The historical roots of psychology are in philosophy and physiology. For a long time philosophers searched for the answers to various questions about the nature of human thought, feeling, and behavior by using philosophical methods like logic and argumentation. On the other hand, throughout the nineteenth century studies in physiology constituted a basis of psychology. Some major developments in the foundation of modern psychology are presented in Table 1.1.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the first journals (Mind in 1876 and American Journal of Psychology in 1887) in the field of psychology were founded and the American Psychological Association (APA) was founded with 42 members in the USA in 1892.

The long past of psychology above presents the picture of the background of this discipline. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two schools of thought in psychology: structuralism and functionalism. Structuralism was developed by Edward Titchener who had been Wilhelm Wundt’s student in his laboratory. Wundt believed that consciousness could be investigated in the laboratory using introspection, that is, asking people about their subjective experience during a perceptual process; however, he never accepted that experimentation was the only route to psychological knowledge (Kowalski & Westen, 2010). On the contrary, Titchener, who was the founder of structuralism in psychology, accepted that laboratory experimentation was the only way to study consciousness. Functionalism, on the other hand, was interested in how our minds adapt to a changing environment rather than the structure of consciousness (Plotnik & Kouyoumdjian, 2011).

Throughout the twentieth century, there were two main distinct approaches to behavior. One emphasized the effects of the environment on behavior and the other concentrated on the effects of internal processes on behavior. The first one was behaviorism which was founded by E. Thorndike, J.B. Watson, and then B.F. Skinner. The other approaches were psychoanalysis and cognitive perspective which concentrated on internal processes. Freud and followers studied the unconscious and suggested several concepts to investigate the unconscious processes. However, cognitive perspective concentrated on the person’s cognitive processes between given stimuli and making a response to these stimuli. These approaches exist as distinct perspectives in contemporary psychology.

Main Perspectives in Psychology

Today’s psychologists approach main questions of psychology from various perspectives. These perspectives can be classified into two as internal and external in terms of the type of causes that they emphasize (Griggs, 2012). The approaches focusing on internal factors are biological and cognitive, and the others explaining psychological phenomena as caused by external factors are behavioral and sociocultural.

Psychodynamic Perspective

The founder of psychodynamic perspective, S. Freud (1856–1939), was a neurologist who lived mostly in Vienna, Austria. He treated many patients with hysteria by using first hypnosis, then psychoanalysis, which he developed as a new way of treatment for psychological disorders. He described the unconscious as a repository of aggression and sexual motivations. Human actions are primarily directed by these motives unconsciously. In his theory, early childhood experiences are very important in the formation of personality. The phases what he called psychosexual developmental stages (oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages) shape one’s personality. The unconscious expresses itself in indirect ways, for instance through dreams. A. Adler (1870–1937) and C.G. Jung (1875–1961), who were followers of Freud, contributed to psychodynamic theory, emphasizing factors other than unconscious sexual motives. Fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Contributors
• 1 Psychology, Sociology, and Social Psychology
• 2 The Relationship between Tourism and Sociology, Psychology, and Social Psychology
• 3 The Effects of Tourism: Economic, Environmental, Social, Cultural, Social Psychological
• 4 Tourism, Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Personal Contact: Gordon Allport’s Contributions to Tourism Research
• 5 Mere Exposure Effect and Tourism Relationship
• 6 Social Exchange Theory and Tourism
• 7 Social Representation Theory and Tourism
• 8 Travel Career Pattern Theory of Motivation
• 9 Social Comparison Theory and Tourism
• 10 Hotel CSR May Not Always Lead to Positive Outcomes: The Role of Attributions about Motives Behind CSR Initiatives
• 11 Attitudes in Tourism and Traveling as a Tool/Instrument for Attitude Change
• 12 Explaining Intergroup and Intragroup Dynamics in Tourism: A Social Identity Approach
• 13 Travel and Transformation: An Examination of Tourists’ Attitude Changes
• 14 Does Tourism Impact on Prejudice, Discrimination, Assimilation, Genocide, Segregation, Integration?
• 15 Re-examining the Tourism and Peace Nexus: A Social Network Theory Perspective
• 16 What Influences Attitude Change? Tourist Satisfaction, Motivation, Personality, Tolerance Level, Contact Situation (Level, Type, Frequency)
• 17 Social/Cultural Distance and Its Reflections on Tourism
• 18 Inbound Tourism and Alteration in Social Culture, Norms, and Community Attitudes in the Tourism Industry: The South Asian Experiences
• 19 Culture Shock Experiences of Tourists: A Transformative Perspective
• 20 Tourist-to-Tourist Interaction (TTI): A Social Distance Perspective
• 21 Value Typology in the Context of the Tourism Sector
• 22 Impact of Overtourism on Residents
• 23 The Dyadic Influence of Personal and Cultural Factors on Tourism and Hospitality
• 24 Social-Psychological Issues in Tourism Business
• 25 Attitudes and Behaviors of Tourism Employees at Work and among Co-workers
• 26 Attitudes (Stereotype and Prejudice) of Local People towards Seasonal Tourism Workers
• 27 Social-Psychological Background of Discrimination and Its Reflections on Tourism
• Conclusions: Tourism and Social Psychology
• Index