Time perception and tourist behavioral decision when travelling

ABSTRACT

During the course of travel, time perception is an inevitable factor influencing tourist behavioral decisions; however, despite the obvious connection, there is a surprising dearth of research in this area. We apply a socioemotional selectivity lens to understand the impacts of time perception on tourist behavioral decisions in the tour via two experiments. Results show that tourists prefer performing problem-focused decisions at the start of the tour while performing emotion-focused decisions at the end of the tour. Such an effect is explained by the mediating role of future time perception. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Time perception
• tourist behavioral decision
• future time perception
• socioemotional selectivity theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (No. 19wkzd13); Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China: [Grant Number 2021A1515012005].