Psychology has long influenced how we understand tourist behaviour, but new research from Dr Astrid Nørfelt and collaborators suggests that tourism psychology research has not yet reached its full potential.
“Our literature review investigated existing tourism psychology research and highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities in this field,” Dr Nørfelt says.
“We found that cognitive, social, environmental, positive and evolutionary psychology have significantly contributed to current developments in tourism psychology.”
Despite this, she says that many modern theories from these branches of psychology remain largely underutilised in tourism research.
“Some of the other challenges we identified include an overreliance on outdated theories, misrepresentations or misunderstandings of modern psychology theories, and a lack of adaptation of psychology theories to the tourism context.
”The review includes a roadmap for tourism scholars to address these issues and highlights opportunities within specific areas of tourism psychology research.
“Tourism psychology has great potential. We hope our findings will provide useful insights for tourism scholars and support them to tackle current challenges within the tourism psychology literature.”
