Social Psychology of Tourism Professor: Angelo Carrieri Email: a.carrieri@unimc.it Assitistants:Donatella Cardone Donatella.cardone@hotmail.it Grazia Ferramosca graziaferramosca@gmail.com

Social Psychology of tourism

What is social psychology? There are two traditions of research in social psychology, like two souls referring to two different stories. Nowadays these stories, sometimes blending together and sometimes remaining distinct. - Psychological social psychology This tradition consider the social condition of human being a variable that is added to the individual structure - Sociological social psychology This tradition consider the social condition of human being as the pre-condition from which the individual behaviour emerges We will study the principal theories and authors without dividing the two traditions but will be possible to understand from which tradition they derive.

Some historical notes - Gustav LeBon wrote the first psychological thesis on society. In his 1885 book “The Crowd: the study of popular mind”, LeBon proposed the idea of crowd mind. With this concept the author argued that people don’t have fixet behaviours, opinions, moral judgments but they change in the presence of others. LeBon’s work was a theory, after his thesis there was a new approach in social psychology based on testable theory. From a theoretical theory to a testable theory, that is a scientifical methodology.

...some historical notes Norman Triplett was the first researcher that tested a theory. According to Triplett the presence of others improve the performance of individuals. He tested the theory asking to children to turn a reel as fast as possible. In the presence of others children performed better. This effect was called “social facilitation” even if subsequent studies demonstrated that the performance in the presence of others depend from the difficulty of the task. When the task is simple the performance will be better while when it is too difficult it will be worst. This second effect is named “social inibition” The importance of Triplett is in having introduced the repeatable measurement in social context

...some historical notes The words social psychology were used for the first time in the book of William McDougall in his work “An Introduction to Social Psychology” (1908). Here the author tried to study psychology like biology, considering social behaviorurs as innate characteristics. The second official contribution was by Floyd Allport (1924). In his book Social Psychology he advocated for the experimental method and introduced the terminology as we know in this field. The crucial moment was after the second world war when there was a boom of researches and researchers who tried to explain the war atrocities and the behaviours related to the war situations. In this period the most famous researches of social psychology are developed.

Cognitive psychology and social cognition The cognitive psychology is considered a revolution with respect to the previous paradigm of behaviorism. The metaphor of the brain as a computer is established, based on the simple input-compute-output algorithm. With cognitivism the period of social cognition opens up, interested in knowing attitudes, values and beliefs. In this period through technology it is possible to investigate the attitudes usually censored by social desirability, through reaction times.

...Social cognition In 1991 Taylor and Fiske published the book “Social Cognition” that summed up the new social psychology. Contemporary social psychology is an improvement of social cognition because it considers not only individual variables but also context and situational variables The main topics of this discipline are: intergroup relationships, streotypes, prejudices, attitudes, tolerance, obedience, leadership, collaboration, affiliation, attraction, aggression, social influence.