Exploring fundamental motives of tourists visiting dark tourism sites

ABSTRACT

Evolutionary psychology offers new potential to understand the motivation of tourists visiting dark sites. This study first identified four fundamental motives (kin care, exploration, affiliation, and status) related to dark tourism contexts, and then examined their relationships with proximal motives and disaster perception. Results found that fundamental motives positively affected corresponding proximate motives and mediated the relationships between disaster perception and proximate motives, and gender and prior experience had moderating effects. This study contributes to better understanding the fundamental psychological mechanisms of tourists visiting dark sites and has some practical implications for these sites' marketing and management.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark tourism site
• tourist
• evolutionary psychology
• fundamental motives
• proximal motives
• disaster perception

Disclosure statement

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

Author statement

Qijie Jiang: funding acquisition, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, software, and original draft.

Scott McCabe: conceptualization, methodology, project administration, resources, supervision, review, and editing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant “Research on the psychological mechanism of tourists in dark tourism from the perspective of evolution” [No. 72302157].