Employing a sort of “we” based VBN model to gauge Chinese tourists' intentions to support low-carbon tourism

Abstract

Low-carbon tourism behaviors by tourists can directly reduce carbon emissions and resource consumption, providing an effective way to promote the high-quality development of tourism. Therefore, promoting low-carbon tourism behaviors among tourists has become a key concern in academia. Most existing studies have investigated the influence of tourists' cognitive, emotional and normative drivers of low-carbon tourism behavior from the perspective of tourists. However, the nature of tourism activities is social interaction, which can have a significant impact on tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior. Moreover, the study of Chinese tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior requires attention to the core elements of Chinese culture. Thus, there is an urgent need to study the low-carbon tourism behavior of tourists as it is embedded in social interactions and strongly influenced by the local Chinese culture. The sense of mianzi and the sense of group consistency are two key Chinese cultural norms that have self-regulatory (personal norms) and other-regulatory (social norms) effects on Chinese social interaction behaviors. This paper uses VBN (value-belief-norm) theory as the basic framework, incorporates two normative factors that reflect Chinese cultural characteristics, mianzi consciousness and group consistency consciousness, and modifies the general VBN model based on Chinese cultural characteristics to construct an integrated model to explain Chinese tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior. The results show that tourists' traditional values have a significant effect on their low-carbon tourism intention through beliefs and personal norms. In addition, we find that the more sensitive tourists' sense of mianzi (personal norms) is, the more significant the effect of perceived group consistency pressure (social norms) is on their low-carbon tourism behavior. This study integrates Chinese cultural normative factors and classical Western environmental behavior theoretical models to extend the study of the influence of Chinese cultural factors on Chinese tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior.