Hi, my name is Patricia Alves and I’m from Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal.
I’m here to present our work on modeling tourists’ personality
in recommender systems: How Does Personality Influence Preferences for Tourist Attractions?
To start I will make a brief introduction, followed by the background on personality
and Recommender Systems (RS), and psychology of tourism.
Next, I will present the methodology used for this study,
the results and respective analysis, and finally, the discussion and future work.
Travelling is an emotional experience and therefore,
personalization is a key factor for the success of RS in tourism.
The more information about the tourist is known better
recommendations can be made.
Throughout the last two decades, personalization became the main concern for the effectiveness of RS.
Therefore, to know personal information about
the user is crucial for building a robust profile.
The researchers increased interest in developing more personalized and accurate RS
created the need to consider other research areas such as Psychology.
Psychological aspects, such as personality, moods and emotions, are being perceived to
influence the variance in the user preferences and behavior in RS, and their consideration
is evidencing to show better results than generic approaches.
Information like the tourists’ demographics, personality traits, socio-cultural aspects,
habits and preferences can be critical factors for the system’s effectiveness.
Many personalized RS that take into account the users motivations, mood , or personality have been developed.
Trip coach, PixMeAway and STSGroup are examples of personality based RS.
So, what defines someone’s personality?
As defined by Eysenck, “personality is the sum-total of the actual or potential behavior-patterns
of the organism, as determined by heredity and environment”.
Each individual has her own behavior patterns,
which are considered relatively stable over time across different situations.
These patterns were summarized into five universal personality dimensions:
Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism,
being the Five Factor Model (FFM),
or Big Five, recognized as the most widely accepted model to represent them.
Personality can be useful in different areas of RS,
since it is strongly related to the users’ preferences.
Users with similar personalities tend to choose similar items or contents.
For example, extraverts who are dependent on warmth and gregariousness
tend to enjoy popular music, and persons who score high
on excitement seeking tend to enjoy rock music.
So, how is personality related to preferences for tourist attractions?
For example, what tourist attractions are preferred by more extravert or open to experience persons?
Research on psychology of tourism is growing fast,
since it is evidenced that psychological aspects are related to the choice of specific destinations.
But which ones?
Several researchers tried to answer that question,
some by proposing tourist typologies based on psychological aspects,
others by trying to find relationships among personality traits and tourist behaviors or preferences.
A great variety of tourist typologies can be found in literature. For instance:
Cohen was one of the first researchers to propose a tourist typology.
Plog is another renown researcher who studied the psychology of travel in tourism.
Gretzel and colleagues proposed 12 travel personalities and found strong correlations
between their respective activities.
However, and as pointed by several authors,
the existing research on tourism behavior is mostly descriptive instead of predictive,
which is a limitation that needs to be overcome, that is, what personality dimensions
or traits are predictive of the tourists’ typologies or preferences found in literature?
This led researchers to study the relationships between personality traits and tourist preferences.
I will briefly show some examples. For instance, Schneider and Vogt found the
interest in cultural experiences, need for arousal and need for material resources were
predictors of hard adventure travel, and the interest in cultural experiences and competitiveness
of soft adventure travel.
And Bujisic and colleagues studied how Extraversion
and Openness to Experience influenced the tourists’ satisfaction with a set of different tourist experiences.
Although many studies on psychology of tourism
for different sectors can be found, many are about typologies of tourists, which are descriptive
of the tourists’ behavior and do not predict how that behavior impacts
the choice of tourist preferences. Others try to predict how psychological aspects
influence tourist behavior or preferences, but most of them only rely on Sensation Seeking
and/or Extraversion scales, which do not cover all the Big Five’s dimensions.
Few studies try to correlate all Big Five dimensions to tourist behavior or preferences,
but none, to the best of our knowledge, correlates the five personality factors to the choice
of a wide range of tourist attractions.
Our research is also motivated by the evidence
that the tourist typologies found in literature do not fully match the tourists’ preferences
for tourist attractions, since many different combinations of intensity for the personality
traits exist, and therefore, a single typology may not be enough for a certain tourist,
as well as not all the attractions present in a typology may be suitable for that tourist.
In order to start overcoming those limitations, we conducted a large-scale study
(and still are conducting) to determine the relationship
between the Big Five personality dimensions and preferences for a wide range of tourist attractions.
First, we studied the terms used for classifying
the most significant tourist attractions. Then, an intensive research was conducted,
to construct a questionnaire to collect as much information as possible about the respondents’
personality, tourist and personal preferences, travel motivations and socio-demography.
Using the snowball sample method, the questionnaire was disseminated, in several waves, by email
to various mailing lists of academic institutions in the North of Portugal,
including professors, scholars, and general employees, which were asked to
share the questionnaire with their respective relatives/friends.
The questionnaire comprised five sections, which asked about socio-demographic data,
personality characteristics, personal preferences and concerns when travelling, travel motivations,
and preferences for tourist attractions when going for an ideal vacation destination.
For the work here presented, the responses were collected for 4 months, from October
2019 to January 2020, gathering a total of 508 viable responses.
Using Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis,
we extracted categories of tourist attractions and analyzed which personality
dimensions were predictors (or not) of preferences for those tourist attractions.
Now I will present the results obtained and their respective analysis.
As can be seen in the graphics, the sample is characterized by a greater percentage of
female respondents, being most of the respondents between 18-40 years old.
74% of respondents have a higher education,
and the formation area of the majority reflects
the academic institutions to which the questionnaire was sent, being more than 50% from “Exact
and Engineering Sciences” and 26% from “Social Sciences and Humanities”.
Has for travelling data, by far the great majority had already visited other countries
in their life, showing the respondents had the experience of interacting with other cultures.
Per year, 79% of the respondents traveled 3 times or less,
and 23% of the respondents had already lived in other countries.
As for the items in the questionnaire representing the tourist attractions,
these table shows the 68 proposed items.
Three Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) were performed on those items,
by using the principal components extraction method
with Varimax rotation, and with Keiser normalization.
Coefficients bellow 0.40 were suppressed and factors with low reliability were removed.
This resulted in 48 final items.
The items were aggregated into 11 factors, explaining 68% of the total variance.
The reliability for the entire scale was very good
which confirmed the items in the scale were all related to the same concepts.
Next, we named each factor according to the concepts they represented, as can be seen in the table:
Adventure; Nature; Entertainment & Nightlife; Sun, Water & Sand; Museums & Landscapes…
Theme & Animal Parks; Cultural Heritage; Sports & Games; Gastronomy; Boat Tours; Health & Well-being.
Next, we conducted a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
to create the first order model to confirm which Attractions saturate the preference
for those Tourist Attractions,
and what correlations exist between the 11 factors.
After several adjustments, this is the proposed
model for the tourist attractions preference.
Finally, the responses to the personality questionnaire were treated
and correlated to the extracted factors.
Here we can see the average scores for each personality dimension was similar,
corresponding to the middle of the respective score range,
which means most of the participants responded in average “3-Neither agree nor disagree”.
This tendency is better shown in these graphics,
where a clear concentration of the results in the average scores of the scale can be seen.
A clear majority of participants show moderate
values in the Extraversion and Neuroticism dimensions,
but in the Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness scores distribution,
the graphics show a higher kurtosis, where the participants classified themselves
more between "3-Neither agree nor disagree" and "5-Agree strongly".
This higher concentration above mid-point scores may be reflecting some social desirability bias.
Next, we applied Structural Equation Modeling
and confirmatory factor analysis to the BFI responses, in order to predict preferences
for the previously proposed tourist attractions. This resulted in the “Personality-Tourist
Attractions Preference Model”.
And… very interesting predictions were found...
Individuals with a higher preference for Adventure tend to score higher on Agreeableness but
lower on Conscientiousness. This goes in line with evidences found in
literature, where less conscientious people tend to enjoy risky activities.
Also, spontaneous individuals seem to get along easily with others.
A higher preference for Nature-related attractions is positively predicted by higher Agreeableness.
These individuals tend to be more sympathetic, considerate and
altruistic, this may correspond to more concerned and attracted to nature individuals.
Entertainment and Nightlife activities are positively associated to all personality dimensions
except Conscientiousness. One can presume almost everyone enjoys some
form of entertainment or outings, but, once again, there is some risk avoidance as well
as a sense of frugality related to conscientious persons that does not seem to
combine with futile spending and/or unhealthy habits.
Activities like going to the beach or a swimming pool are strongly related to more extraverted,
open to experience and neurotic individuals.
Extraverts may appreciate the opportunity to be in contact with other people,
both new and known acquaintances, and at the same time
feel comfortable with their body-image.
Individuals with high openness
may enjoy the aesthetic experience that comes with appreciating a beach for its natural
beauty, along with the meditative state this surroundings may induce.
In turn, neurotics may appreciate these activities for consisting in somewhat predictable vacations,
almost a default option in the context of our country, thus reassuring a strong sense
of safety and control which is dear to these individuals.
Visiting museums and landscape viewing are preferred by more open to experience individuals,
while extraverted are negatively associated.
Sense can be made that enjoying historical artifacts or
pursuing intimate experiences commonly brought by absorbing impactful sceneries
are activities more akin to individual enjoyment and solitude.
The preference for visiting Theme and Animal Parks is positively predicted by persons with
higher Agreeableness, Neuroticism and Extraversion.
The preference for Theme and Animal Parks is negatively predicted by Openness to experience,
possibly for its standardized, not-so-intellectually-challenging nature.
No significant prediction was found for Conscientiousness.
Archeological sites, monuments and historic cities/villages are also positively
sought by agreeable, conscientious and open to experience individuals,
but negatively by extraverts, who may not find very exciting
that sort of activities as they are averse to sedentarism.
Sports and games are negatively associated to conscientious and open to experience individuals,
but agreeableness and extraversion are positively related,
which can derive from the cooperativeness, energy, and high activity level inherent to
these activities.
Gastronomy experiences are positively valued
by more agreeable and extraverted persons, which can explain why who appreciates food
and wine is usually seen as cheerful and high-spirited.
No significant relations were found for the other three personality factors.
Boat tours are preferred by individuals with higher agreeableness and openness to experience,
which is similar to the interpretation given for beach/swimming pool activities
and landscape viewing.
Health and well-being are valued by those with higher Agreeableness and Extraversion,
but with lower Openness.
No significant association was found to Conscientiousness and Neuroticism,
which does not mean they do not exist.
The results found demonstrate a strong relation between the five personality dimensions and
preferences for tourist attractions, that means, preferences for specific tourist attractions
can be predicted by the tourists’ personality, meaning they can be used in RS for tourism
to automatically model the users’ preferences.
This work brought new insights, successfully
and strongly relating all the Big Five personality dimensions to preferences for specific tourist
attractions, showing all the extracted tourist attractions factors are
relevant and can be predicted by the personality dimensions, constituting, to the best of our
knowledge, the first “Personality-Tourist Attractions Preference” model in literature to do so.
Since this study is part of an ongoing larger
study, we believe the model’s fit will considerably improve with the increase in size and heterogeneity
of the sample. It was also found that due to the self-reporting
answers in the BFI, some personality dimensions had a higher concentration above mid-point
scores, which may reflect some social desirability bias, or that the
sample should be more diverse.
In fact, most of the respondents had a higher
education level, which can explain the greater frequency of higher scores in dimensions like
Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness, meaning this study is limited
in predicting tourist attractions preferences for individuals with lower education.
Also, most respondents were from Exact or Social
Sciences, meaning the sample was poor on other fields of education, which can also account
for the lower variability found in Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness
and Agreeableness, since, for instance, individuals with Artistic formation would positively influence
the Openness to Experience overall score.
Also, we cannot forget the questionnaire was
conducted in a Portuguese population, and therefore some relationships found between
personality and tourist attractions can be culture specific. However, our intention is
to conduct the same study on different cultures and compare the results.
Although personality revealed to be a great predictor of tourist preferences, to focus
only on the five personality dimensions and not on the more granular thirty traits and
on the correlations between them, seems to limit the preferences prediction.
For example, a person considered extraverted may not be a risk taker or like adrenaline-filled
activities. It would not be very good if a RS suggested a rollercoaster to the tourist.
Since the questionnaire allowed to obtain significant data, it will be further analyzed,
along with the incoming data, to determine which of the 30 personality traits can be
inferred from the BFI.
With the ongoing questionnaire, we also intend
to study how personality influences the tourists’ travel motivations and concerns while travelling.
Finally… it is quite evident that personality is not the only responsible for tourist preferences,
but it seems undeniable that personality plays an important role in the kind of tourist attractions
one chooses to visit.
Thank you...
and stay safe!