Can we enhance low-carbon tour intentions through climate science or responsibility sharing information?

Abstract

In line with social representations theory, our study presents two mediating models to examine the psychological mechanism underlying how tourists’ intentions toward low-carbon tours could be enhanced through a reduction in their ambivalence toward low-carbon tours. Recruiting 767 independent tourists, applying an ordinary-least-square simple regression, and following the mediating testing approach of Baron and Kenny (1986), we have found that using scientific climate information can efficiently strengthen tourists’ travel intentions toward engaging in low-carbon tours and can also reduce tourists’ ambivalence toward low-carbon tours. We found, however, that another tourist education approach, responsibility sharing, did not have a similar effect, owing possibly to the social-loafing effect.

Keywords:

• low-carbon tourism
• tourist education
• ambivalence
• information persuasion
• social loafing
• climate change

Acknowledgements

An early version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business, Vancouver, Canada, June 25, 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the tourism-research domain, tourist intention has been regarded as a proxy for tourist behaviours (Baker & Crompton, 2000; Gössling & Buckley, 2014; Han, 2015; Jo, Lee, & Reisinger, 2014; Kim & Weiler, 2013; Kim, 2011). Behavioural intentions are the motivational components of behaviours and involve the degree to which individuals are willing to engage in a behaviour (Ajzen, 1991). Therefore, tourist intention regarding a specific behaviour could be a proximal cause of the behaviour (Jang & Feng, 2007). We expect that the greater a tourist’s intention to participate in a low-carbon tour, the more likely the tourist would be to actually take a low-carbon tour.

2 Even though the meaning of ‘ambivalence’ is similar to that of ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Jamieson, 1993; Newby-Clark, McGregor, & Zanna, 2002), they are distinct constructs in at least one important sense: ‘ambivalence’ implies psychological conflict in a person who is confronting at least two inconsistent ideas, whereas ‘cognitive dissonance’ implies no psychological conflict in a person who is confronting at least two inconsistent ideas (Maio, Esses, & Bell, 2000). In fact, Maio et al.’s (2000) experimental research demonstrated that ambivalence and cognitive dissonance are distinct concepts in their respective psychological effects. Ambivalence, much more than cognitive dissonance, is associated with people’s strong motivation to process persuasive messages. The aforementioned research, in conclusion, found a weak correlation between ambivalence and cognitive dissonance.

3 The z prime statistics share the same formula as Baron and Kenny’s (1986) procedure for estimating the mediated effect. MacKinnon et al. (2004) argued that the sampling distribution of z is not normally distributed, so if z passes 0.97 for α = .05, the mediated effect should be sustained. The traditional critical value of 1.96 is a conservative critical value from the normal distribution results that cause inflation in type 1 errors.

4 Social loafing refers to the phenomenon wherein individuals reduce their performance when they are working as part of a group rather than on their own. Empirically, there can be many causes of social loafing: individuals might over-anticipate others’ contributions to the group (i.e. they expect that the others’ efforts will be sufficient to achieve the group’s aim) (Olson, 1971); the individuals’ contribution cannot be recognized or measured by others (Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981); the individuals’ additional output or efforts will likely be negated or undercut by others in the group (Latane, 1981); the individuals reduce their own output to retain their perception of fairness because they believe that any additional output will encourage other group members to slack off (Jackson & Harkins, 1985; Karau & Williams, 1993); or individuals are aware that their own output is not essential to a high-quality group product or is not unique (Harkins & Petty, 1982).

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C., for its financial support [grant number NSC 101-3113-S-241-001]. The authors would like to thank the travel and research grant [CPZ 20140625] support from Chi-Po Zhai Chinese Medical Clinic System, Taiwan.