CHAPTER 6

Facilitating Environmental Fit I

(or Sounds Like a Great Trip for My Sister, but Not For Me!)

Chapter Preview

This chapter discusses the importance to effective travel planning of finding a fit between the travel environment and one’s personality styles, preferences, and value orientations. Personality styles and preferences are examined in terms of Costa and McCrae’s Five-Factor Model of Personality and Plog’s Psychographic Typology of Tourists. Value orientations are defined through the Values in Action approach of Petersen and Seligman.

Finding a Match

As we have seen in this book, all of us tend to feel happier and more comfortable in some types of surroundings than others. The importance to happiness of person-environment fit, in fact, has been the topic of much literature in psychology (Schueller 2014), where research findings have supported the simple idea that we do better and feel better in environments that match us well and bring out our strengths rather than play to our weaknesses. This is true in work settings, educational settings, and travel settings, although this latter fact is sometimes forgotten. What this means for travel is that simply providing all of us with similar dream vacations will not guarantee that we will respond to and/or enjoy these vacations in the same manner. If, for instance, we feel miserable, anxious, restless, bored, or in some other way out of tune with our circumstances, it will be hard for us to be receptive to any positive factors we encounter. However, if we are lucky enough to be placed in environments where we feel more fully at ease and in sync with our situations, our ability to savor and appreciate where we are will be enhanced. In fact, when we talk about finding wonderful travel destinations, what we often mean is simply finding situations in which our particular combination of personality styles and strengths are well suited to the travel setting we are in (Pressman, Matthews, Cohen, Martire, Scheier and Baum 2009; Rashid 2015; Diener, Larsen and Emmons 1984; Schueller 2014; Sheldon and Elliot 1999). In such environments, we are likely to experience a sense of what has been called existential authenticity, or a perception that we are being true to ourselves in our actions and behavior (Pearce, Filep and Ross 2011; Wang 1999). This occurs when we feel that we are not forcing things or playing fake roles, but are honestly representing ourselves as we are. Thus, pleasure in travel is a product both of what we bring to it and the qualities of the setting in which we find ourselves. Neither alone is determinative.

Let’s now examine what some of the key personality dimensions are that influence our sense of fit or non-fit with our environments. We will start with an exploration of the Big Five Theory of Personality.

The Big Five

The Five-Factor Model of Personality, also known as The Big Five Theory of Personality, is what is called a trait theory of behavior. Traits are relatively stable dispositions of individuals that dispose people to behave and react in certain ways across a wide range of situations (Pervin 1989). This particular trait theory has received a great deal of attention in both the applied and theoretical research literature in psychology (Costa and McCrae 1988; John, Naumann and Soto 2008; Soni 2019). The theory proposes that there are five basic dimensions of personality on which everyone can be reliably placed: introversion/extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The first three have the most relevance for travel, and they will be the ones we will discuss here.

The trait of introversion/extroversion has to do with how comfortable we feel in a variety of social situations and how much arousal we tend to seek out from others in our environments. If, for example, we are high on extroversion, interactions tend to energize and build us up rather than drain or tire us. In fact, extroverts often are most edgy and bored when they are just by themselves, and they crave excitement and stimulation from the external world, especially from other people. By contrast, for those who exhibit a more introverted style, lots of social interactions tend to make us tired and fatigued. In fact, we often feel worse rather than better after such contact and yearn for some alone time to restore our energy. People who are more introverted also tend to be more cautious when in public settings than those high in extroversion and very conscious of how they think they look to others.

Openness, the second trait from the Big Five that we will describe, is related to how much we enjoy exploring unfamiliar environments and seeking out settings that are unusual and different. Those of us who are high on the trait of openness tend to be imaginative and curious and like to learn about new ideas and new perspectives. Those lower on this dimension, by contrast, are apt to be less drawn to the new and the different, and would probably be much more comfortable staying with the familiar and the tried and true.

The trait of conscientiousness relates to how responsible we tend to be in our behavior and to how important it is to be thorough and prepared for all contingencies. Those of us high on this trait tend to be reliable and careful in our behavior. By contrast, those lower on this trait often exhibit less careful and more freewheeling, spur-of-the-moment interaction styles.

The Big Five purports to assess the basic structure of personality, and numerous investigations have shown it to be predictive of our experiences in a wide range of situations, including pleasure in different types of travel environments (Jani 2014). As we think about this, it should be kept in mind that the Big Five describes general categories of behavior, and many of us fall somewhere in the middle on the represented dimensions. In fact, we probably have an intuitive sense of where we fit on these various continuums and of the affect that has on how well we manage or do not manage different types of circumstances. For instance, with regard to introversion/extroversion, we know that we can fake being more extroverted or introverted than we actually are, but that this takes great effort to do and does not feel quite right for us. The same goes for the factors of conscientiousness and openness, which orient us to the world in certain ways. Thus, these Big Five dimensions provide us with a good shortcut understanding of what kind of person we are, and, in this way, they are a very robust and useful metric to use to examine the concept of environmental fit.

Plog’s Psychographic Typology of Tourists

Another interesting model to examine in terms of the concept of environmental fit in traveling is Plog’s Model of Tourist Typology (Plog 1974). The model is used to categorize us into different personality types who exhibit different travel destination preferences. Although this model has had a major influence on the field of tourism studies and has been used to expand our understanding of factors that can impact an array of tourist choices and decisions, it has generated numerous critics as well as advocates among tourism researchers (see Dann 1981; Cruz-Milan 2018).

Basically, Plog (1974; 2001; 2002) suggested our travel preferences can be divided into the two dimensions of allocentric (or venturers) versus psychocentrics (or dependables). Allocentrics, similar in some ways to those high on the Big Five’s dimension of openness, tend to be adventurous and curious and exhibit preferences for that which is new and novel in travel situations. Psychocentrics, on the other hand, are apt to be less adventuresome and more comfortable in familiar and structured settings where a high degree of predictability is present. Later, Plog (1991) added a dimension called energy to his model, which assesses the degree that travelers tend to be lively and vigorous versus lethargic and less energetic in their behavioral styles. All of these categories, of course, represent endpoints on continuums, just as we talked about with the Big Five, with most of us falling somewhere in the middle between the various represented poles.

While not always finding full predictive support (Litvin 2006; Smith 1990), Plog’s conceptualization does seem to be getting at some core underlying factors that reliably differentiate among people who have various types of travel needs and motivations (Griffin and Albanese 1996) and who prefer different types of travel settings. Consequently, it has been a fairly durable model to explain some aspects of our travel behavior. Similar to the Big Five model, it is probably easy for most of us to say with some confidence where we fall on the allocentric/psychometric or high/low energy continuums. This conceptualization, thus, can give us a good general template to use when we are predicting the appropriateness of different types of travel venues.

Character Virtues and Strengths

In addition to looking at personality traits, a values framework can be used to predict the degree of satisfaction we might experience in different types of travel surroundings. Values are types of social cognitions that guide our ways of looking at the world and our evaluations of our own and others’ behavior (Cantril and Allport 1933). They are generally more prescriptive in nature than traits; that is, they direct us to try to act in ways that might be described as being good or ideal, rather than just typical. Although there have been many conceptualizations and assessment methods utilized to define different types of values (see Rokeach 1979; Kahle 1983), a particularly interesting approach came out of a positive psychology construction. Here, instead of looking at values as abstract aspirational ideals, values are seen as virtues we all possess to a greater or lesser degree. For instance, in a model presented by Peterson and Seligman (2004), six core virtues such as wisdom and courage were identified, which encompassed 24 different character strengths, such as love of beauty or curiosity or creativity. These character strengths, empirically derived from self-reports of our actual behavior in different situations, are hypothesized to paint pictures of our functioning at its very best. In such circumstances, we feel on top of our game and highly energized and fully alive. We are, in a word, flourishing (Govindji and Linley 2007; Sheldon and Elliot 1999; Seligman 2012).

As can be seen, in this strength-based approach, the focus of inquiry is shifted. Rather than directly assessing general traits, it asks us to empirically describe situations in which we feel effective and invigorated, and then character strengths and patterns of virtues are inferred from that. For instance, we may come to recognize that we feel best in situations where we are given the opportunity to be creative or to express our love for learning or to exhibit our natural social intelligence. Whatever our particular strengths are, when we express them we feel a lack of strain and a deep sense of rightness, which is both energizing and restoring.

The Three Models

These three models offer us different perspectives on what it means to describe oneself as a person. Each model shines a light on us in a slightly different way, so travel providers have a choice about how to utilize them in ways that best suit our particular needs. We will explore more about this in the next chapter.

Questions for Discussion

Before we turn to the next chapter, though, please work with the following questions to think more about the importance of finding a fit between your personality traits and styles and the travel environment in which you are in. Draw on your own personal experience and/or your experience in some aspect of the travel industry as you do this.

Notes