Kock, Florian, Josiassen, Alexander, and Assaf, A. George (2018) On the origin of tourist behavior. Annals of Tourism Research, 73. pp. 180-183.

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Abstract

[Extract] The behavior of modern-day tourists seems embedded in their contemporary lives, with little connection to their ancestral past; the hiking trip to Scandinavia or visiting romantic Paris seem to be fully explainable in a contemporary context. However, this research note makes the case that these decisions are actually rooted in motives that evolved because of the implications they had for our ancestors. Just as Darwin brought a wider lens to the study of species, we motivate that evolutionary psychology provides fertile ground for future tourism research, through a fusion of tourism, psychology and biology. The young research stream of evolutionary psychology has contributed tremendously to understand human behavior in recent years (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013). The fundamental premise is that modern human beings have inherited psychological mechanisms that predispose them to act in ways that helped our ancestors to survive and procreate. Tourist behavior is a particularly suitable context in which these remnants of the past can be observed, albeit not always in obvious ways. In particular, an evolutionary lens supplements existing tourism research, and provides new and interesting explanations for tourist behavior (Crouch, 2013) with resulting implications for theory and practice.

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