What determines holidaying interest? Extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations

Abstract

Motivation is a crucial subject because it is known to influence behavior in every domain, including tourism. In tourism research, there have inter alia been debates on a theoretical level about whether extrinsic or intrinsic motivations exert the strongest impact on people's desire to travel for pleasure. Since there does not exist a single work on tourism motivation that empirically addresses this puzzle, this study, by applying an evolutionary approach, examines whether extrinsic or intrinsic factors have the strongest direct effect on people's interest for holidaying. This study represented the extrinsic motivations with two culturally related variables (vertical and horizontal cultural transmission), and captured the intrinsic motivations with two psychological variables (perceptual and epistemic curiosity). Two competing structural models were then constructed and ran on the basis of data collected from a sample (N=1001) of the Norwegian population in 2010. The results show that the extrinsic model is superior to the intrinsic model, which suggests that sociocultural factors have a stronger direct effect on people's interest for holidaying than do psychological factors. Further, the analysis shows both that the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations together explain a considerable share of the variation in interest for holidaying, and that horizontal cultural transmission has the strongest influence on holidaying interest. This study concludes with a discussion of the main theoretical and practical implications. © 2012 Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology.