ATTITUDES IN TOURISM AND TRAVELING AS A TOOL/INSTRUMENT FOR ATTITUDE CHANGE

Abstract

Attitudes can be defined as general evaluations of the objects, ideas, and people that an individual encounters in his or her life or, a cognitive process involving positive or negative evaluations of an individual towards a specific object. Attitudes guide the thoughts, behaviors, and even feelings of an individual. In other words, this process can also affect the individual’s behavior towards an object. Attitude change refers to the change in the direction and the intensity of the individual’s attitude towards an object of attitude. Due to the functional value of attitudes, processes that change attitudes have always been an important topic of social psychology. Travel can be considered as one of these processes. The problem of whether tourism and travel are mediators of attitude change is of great importance in current social psychology research. In line with this, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the studies on the attitudes of host community and tourists, on whether tourism plays a mediating role in individuals’ attitude change and to reveal how this issue is approached in current research.