Motivation and personality traits for choosing religious tourism. A research on the case of Medjugorje.

Religion has long been a primary motivation for journeys and it is considered the oldest non-economic reason for travelling. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons tourists choose to travel to sacred sites, with the specific aim of discovering relationships between personality traits and motivations for religious travel. Participating in the research were 679 Italian travellers to Medjugorje sanctuary, who completed the travel motivation scale and big five questionnaire. The results show that motivation is focused prevalently on the need for discovery in men and socialisation in women. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that personality traits are predictive of motivation factors differently for males and females

A COMPARISON BETWEEN MOTIVATIONS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS IN RELIGIOUS TOURISTS AND CRUISE SHIP TOURISTS

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the motivations and the personality traits that characterize tourists who choose religious travels versus cruises. Participating in the research were 683 Italian tourists (345 males and 338 females, age range 18–63 years); 483 who went to a pilgrimage travel and 200 who chose a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Both groups of tourists completed the Travel Motivation Scale and the Big Five Questionnaire. Results show that different motivations and personality traits characterize the different types of tourists and, further, that motivations for traveling are predicted by specific —some similar, other divergent— personality trait

IL LATO OSCURO DELLA COLPA!

Francesco Mancini e Amelia Gangemi propongono una tesi duale sul senso di colpa delineando le caratteristiche della colpa deontologica – sensazione di avere trasgredito una norma morale senza che vi sia una vittima – e della colpa altruistica – sensazione di aver violato un principio altruistico senza la trasgressione di una norma morale. Gli autori presentano alcune prove comportamentali, cognitive e neurofisiologiche che dimostrano che i due sensi di colpa hanno tratti distintivi divers

L\u2019atteggiamento nei confronti della pubblicit\ue0 comparativa: efficacia persuasiva dei messaggi bilaterali

The effect of a comparative advertising on attitude toward the brand and on attitude toward the ad was studied. In the first experiment, a comparative and a not-comparative advertising of a fictitious brand of stroller for children has been presented to 160 subjects. Results demonstrate that subjects, when exposed to a comparative communication, are likely to scrutiny the persuasive message and the elaboration tend to be high. The analysis shows moreover that comparative advertising evokes a less favorable attitude toward the ad. In the second experiment, the persuasive effectiveness of a two-sided messages compared to one-sided message was verified. Finally, in the third experiment we hypothesize that a two-sided messages comparative advertising does not suffer the undesired effect found in the first study, that is the unfavorable attitude toward the ad. Like expected, results indicate that subjects exposed to a comparative communication with bilateral message have more favorable attitudes toward the brand and more favorable attitudes toward the ad than subjects exposed to not-comparative communicatio

Effetti di Priming sul comportamento d'aiuto

Previous research studies have used priming techniques to increase willingness to help, but most of these have simply measured intention to engage in prosocial behavior rather than real helping behavior. Two different studies investigated the effect of priming the concept of prosocial behavior on real helping behavior. After priming prosociality through a scrambled sentences test, participants were shown to increase their donation rate after a direct request coming from an experimenter's confederate (Study 1) and to spontaneously help to a greater extent a girl whose books had fallen on the floor (Study 2). The implications of this automatic behavior priming effect are discussed within the theoretical framework of the automatic effect of social perception on prosocial behavior

The Fairness Principle, Reward, and Altruistic Behavior

The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between reward and altruism. It was hypothesized that the altruistic behavior of someone who has been asked for help will occur only after the person asking for help has been evaluated. As a result, if the situation of a person asking for help is perceived as less fortunate, help will be given even if no proportional award is received in return, according to a principle based on need that makes people feel they should help the needy. Results show that when the participants received an unfair award, they tended to offer much bigger donations only in the condition in which the other was perceived as less fortunate

The Effect of Perspective-Taking on Linguistic Intergroup Bias

In this experiment, we examined the effect of perspective-taking-actively contemplating others' psychological experiences-on linguistic intergroup bias. We asked some participants to adopt the perspective of a character (an Italian or a Maghrebian), while others did not receive similar instructions, and complete a short dialogue comprised of a series of vignettes, resulting in a 2 (perspective-taking: presence vs. control) x 2 (group: ingroup vs. outgroup) between-participants design. We analyzed the texts produced on the basis of the linguistic category model. As expected, participants were more likely to describe the outgroup member using less abstract terms when we asked them to take the perspective of a Maghrebian. Since the level of abstraction of the terms used to describe a person's behavior is considered an index of stereotype use, one might describe Maghrebians less stereotypically when he or she can see the world from their perspective. The results extend previous findings on the role of perspective-taking as it relates to reducing intergroup stereotypes