Untitled

34 attitude
that information. In tourism, attention can be seen
as a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient,
condition for such communication exercises as
the advertising campaigns used in destination
marketing, safety information and interpretation.
Two types of attention have been described by
psychologists: passive or reflexive, and active or
volitional. Active attention refers to situations in
which people consciously choose to direct their
attention towards something, which requires effort.
An example would be a tourist with a particular
interest in a period of history who deliberately
concentrates on reading text and displays on that
topic in a museum. Passive or reflexive attention
is a response to some characteristic of the
environment and requires no conscious effort or
decisions on the part of the individual. The classic
example is the ability of people to recognise and
focus on their own name being used in another
conversation at a crowded party.
Much research has been directed towards
understanding the aspects of the environment
which attract human attention. An understanding
of such aspects is important in the design of
successful communication efforts. Several factors
have been found to consistently draw people's
attention. The first of these is the intensity of
stimuli used. Attention is automatically given to
very loud, large or brightly coloured stimuli.
Change and movement in the environment also
draw human attention, as do conflict and the
appearance of something unexpected. Attention is
also given to objects or features which are
connected to something of personal interest or
relevance. This is an example of the influence of
motivation on people's perceptions and actions.
Further reading
Hayes, N. �1994) Foundations of Psychology, London:
Routledge. �A comprehensive introduction to
psychology as a discipline; pp. 49±62 provide a
good introduction to the concept of attention
and its use in psychology.)
Kahneman, D. �1973) Attention and Effort, Engelwoods
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. �A review of
attention research in psychology and the pre-
sentation of a theoretical model to describe the
relationship between attention and cognition.)
attitude
GIANNA MOSCARDO, AUSTRALIA
There is broad agreement that attitudes are
cognitive structures for organising one's experience
of the world �see cognition). The term has its
origins in the notion of people taking a stance,
position or even a certain type of posture towards
objects, people and settings. The development of
the term in the last fifty years has been to clarify
three main components of attitudes: the knowledge
of or beliefs about an object or topic; a positive or
negative evaluation of that object or topic; and a
direction or imperative on how to behave when the
object or topic is encountered. Attitudes may be
held at a broad or a fine-grained scale and they
may be focused towards either activities, people or
abstract concepts.
Attitudes are a prime organising construct in the
field of tourist behaviour, and many survey
studies of visitors and host communities are
centrally concerned with assessing attitudes �see
satisfaction). In the broad array of terms which
exist to describe cognitive structures and the
psychological functioning of tourists, the term
`attitude' may be seen as the pre-eminent concept.
It is virtually synonymous with the term `opinion',
which it has largely replaced in the social science
literature. Attitudes is a more generic term than
beliefs which refers exclusively to the knowledge
component of attitudes, while the expression
`values' summarises clusters of attitudes on a
particular topic. Social representations are an
even larger framework for understanding attitudes,
as it considers not just the aggregated attitudes of
individuals into values but the shared views of a
community towards major topics of social significance.
On a more detailed scale, expectations can
be defined as pre-travel or pre-experience attitudes,
while satisfaction studies can be conceptualised as
attitude research conducted after the trip.
Much of the research conducted by social
psychologists has concentrated on understanding
the structure of attitudes and how to change