Future scholarship on cognitive and metacognitive attitudes in tourism

ABSTRACT

This study aims to assess the factors that influence consumer attitude towards a destination, and to present a new conceptual framework for further investigation of the role of cognition and metacognition in tourism attitudinal research. Existing research in social psychology has established that three factors influence consumer attitude; amount of thought, valence of thinking and thought confidence. While cognition, amount and valence of thinking, has been studied previously in tourism research, metacognition, measured as thought confidence, is often overlooked in the field. To address this gap, this research note employs the self-validation hypothesis from social psychology to explore consumers’ attitudes towards a tourism destination. The findings show metacognition plays a central role in forming destination attitude. Also, valence of thinking has the strongest impact on attitude. This research note contributes to tourism knowledge by exploring the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of attitude formation. In addition, this study adds value by proposing a model to guide future tourism attitudinal research.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• metacognition
• attitude
• self-validation hypothesis
• tourism

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arghavan Hadinejad

Arghavan Hadinejad, PhD, is a Lecturer at University of South Australia, Australia. She has both industry and academic experience in tourism and destination marketing. Arghavan’s research focus is on cognitive psychology, social psychology, emotion, attitude, advertisement, physiological technologies and destination marketing.

Anna Kralj

Anna Kralj, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University, Australia. Anna’s research interests focus on human resource management, service management and attitudinal studies.

Sarah Gardiner

Sarah Gardiner, PhD, is a deputy director of Griffith Institute for Tourism at Griffith University, Australia. Her research interests include destination marketing and development, tourism, economic and event development strategies, and consumer behaviour and market analysis.