Tourists and Air Pollution: How and Why Air Pollution Magnifies Tourists’ Suspicion of Service Providers

Abstract

Air pollution is becoming a serious socio-environmental problem in many modern societies and poses significant economic threats to popular tourism destinations. Despite the documented consequences of air pollution on tourism demand, studies have seldom examined its impact on individuals’ psychological states, especially in the tourism context. Through a correlational study and two experiments, our findings indicate that tourists are more likely to be suspicious of local service providers when travelers perceive a destination as having heavy air pollution (vs. one without such pollution). This relationship presumably exists because tourists experience greater pessimism in an environment with high air pollution, which in turn influences their evaluations of service providers. Following this logic, we show that the effect diminishes when tourists are cognizant of (and thus rely less on) their pessimistic feelings when evaluating service providers. Finally, we offer theoretical and practical implications of this effect in tourism.

Keywords

air pollution social suspicion felt pessimism tourist–service provider interaction

Introduction

Air quality, as an important component of weather and climate, is an external factor in tourism that can strongly influence tourism demand, travelers’ participation in activities, and the overall tourism experience (McKercher et al. 2015; Xu and Reed 2017; Wang, Fang, and Law 2018). Many tourism destinations are plagued by increasing air pollution such as haze; Cairo, Beijing, Naples, and Mexico City are among the top 50 most polluted cities worldwide (Numbeo 2019). Estimates have shown that approximately 20% of top-ranked tourist cities are perceived as having heavy air pollution (Hedrick-Wong and Choong 2016).

Besides posing threats to destinations, air pollution has been acknowledged as an increasingly serious health risk to individuals’ physical well-being, affecting 90% of the world’s population (World Health Organization [WHO] 2018). According to WHO’s official website, air pollution is a common cause of health problems such as lung cancer, stroke, and ischemic heart disease. Research has shown that exposure to even a small amount of particulate matter can lead to high mortality in the Medicare population (Di et al. 2017). Although the health-related consequences of air pollution have been well established, the effects of such pollution on individuals’ psychological states and responses warrant further study.

Extended research in this area could unveil novel implications for the tourism industry. Tourism is often regarded as a pleasure-seeking experience (Gnoth 1997; Goossens 2000), and travelers’ psychological states and responses are key determinants of this experience. Given sufficient information, tourists could be well prepared to combat the effects of air pollution on their health by taking preventative measures, such as wearing a mask and avoiding busy streets. However, travelers may not be fully aware of the extent to which their psychological states and responses are shaped by air pollution in a destination. Relevant findings may raise tourists’ awareness of their behavioral choices while visiting polluted destinations. In addition, air pollution is a complex year-round problem requiring comprehensive, long-term environmental management (Bai et al. 2018); environmental governance cannot be accomplished in a single action or over the short term. Thus, for destinations suffering from air pollution, it is important to identify solutions to reduce and predict pollution. Destination management organizations must also learn how to preserve tourists’ experiences and understand tourists’ psychological responses under the influence of air pollution.

In this study, we examine how air pollution influences tourists’ experiences in different service contexts, thus making an innovative contribution to tourism research. Scholars previously examined tourists’ impacts on local air pollution (Kavallinis and Pizam 1994; Saenz-de-Miera and Rosselló 2014). Researchers have also assessed the influences of air pollution on the local tourism industry, such as how pollution reduces tourism demand (Anaman and Looi 2000; Sajjad, Noreen, and Zaman 2014; Wang, Fang, and Law 2018); however, little is known about how and why air pollution influences tourists’ experiences at an individual level. This study makes the first attempt to explore this lacuna by examining the impact of air pollution on tourism from a novel perspective. Specifically, rather than evaluating the effect of air pollution on the macro industry of tourism, we focus on how air pollution influences individual tourists’ interactions with service providers.

Tourist–service provider interactions play a vital role in the tourism context. Tourism is inherently associated with traveling to and staying in places outside one’s usual environment (Mathieson and Wall 1982). Compared with staying at home, tourists must adapt to geographically, personally, socially, and culturally unfamiliar environments when traveling (Greenblat and Gagnon 1983). Such adaptation often occurs within the context of new social interactions: tourists interact with local service providers when purchasing food and beverages, accommodations, transportation, sightseeing, shopping, entertainment, and other essential facilities. Additionally, culture shock is common during international travel, where unfamiliar social interactions happen more frequently (Furnham 1984). With atypical social interactions, there comes a greater likelihood of tourist suspicion. The literature has suggested that suspicion and trust are important elements underlying many social interactions, and defined suspicion/trust as people’s subjective feeling of lower/higher certainty about others’ trustworthiness (Deutsch 1958; Kee and Knox 1970). Previous research in tourism mainly focuses on the trust part (e.g., figuring out determinants of tourists’ trust), while paying little attention to the antecedents and consequences of tourist suspicion (Agag and El-Masry 2017; Gregori, Daniele, and Altinay 2014). However, it should be noted that suspicion can pose a serious threat to the cultivation and maintenance of social relationships (Kramer 1999; Morgan and Hunt 1994). As relationship management is a key objective for many service providers (Aurier and N’Goala 2010), it is important to identify the factors that might increase tourists’ suspicion when interacting with service providers. In this study, air pollution is treated as a situational factor influencing tourist–service provider interactions. We hypothesize that perceptions of air pollution will magnify tourists’ suspicion of service providers, and this effect is driven by individuals’ increased sense of pessimism.

Our research contributes to the literature in four aspects. First, by examining how and why air pollution influences tourists’ psychological states and responses, this study provides a novel perspective on the relationship between air pollution and tourism. Second, our work extends the literature by examining a new psychological consequence among individuals in an environment of air pollution. In particular, this study investigates for the first time the impact of air pollution on tourists’ social suspicion in tourism, which can be extended to customer relationship management in the travel and tourism industry. Third, by testing felt pessimism as an underlying process using mediation and moderation approaches, we shed light on a novel mechanism through which air pollution can color individuals’ social judgments of others and then provide recommendations to attenuate such an effect. At last, to our knowledge, this research represents the first attempt in tourism to employ an experimental method to examine the impact of air pollution.

Literature Review

Air Pollution and Tourism

Weather and climate comprise an important research area in tourism because the tourism industry is highly weather-dependent (Becken and Wilson 2013; Denstadli, Jacobsen, and Lohmann 2011; Wilkins et al. 2018). In the case of tourists’ travel motivations in a push–pull framework, weather or climate is often considered an important destination pull factor (Klenosky 2002). In general, favorable weather conditions attract tourist flows and enhance tourism experiences, whereas unfavorable weather conditions can cause a destination to suffer. Indeed, comfortable weather is a driving force for tourists to embark on domestic or international travel (H. Li, Song, and Li 2017). Jeuring and Becken (2013) recognized the adverse effects of severe weather on tourism and examined how tourists protected themselves when facing the risk of potentially severe weather. A growing body of tourism literature has extended the concept of weather to include specific climatic variables, such as temperature, rainfall, and sunshine (Alegre and Cladera 2006; Álvarez-Díaz and Rosselló-Nadal 2010; Becken 2013; Eugenio-Martin and Campos-Soria 2010). These studies have offered deeper insights into the impacts of specific aspects of weather or climate on tourism demand. Most have focused on travelers’ overall preference for a destination.

More recently, attention has shifted to air pollution as a specific weather variable. Different from other climate variables, air pollution is unique because its proliferation has begun to threaten the development of many destinations; what’s worse, air pollution forecasts are especially uncertain in the long term (UK-AIR 2019). The importance of air pollution to tourism has been recognized in a few empirical studies (McKercher et al. 2015; Sajjad, Noreen, and Zaman 2014). For example, Wang, Fang, and Law (2018) focused on the effect of air pollution in the place of origin on outbound tourism demand and found that air pollution was a driving force pushing local tourists to purchase overseas travel packages. In terms of tourism demand, Xu and Reed (2017) investigated how air pollution could influence inbound tourism demand and discovered that greater perceived pollution of a destination impeded international tourist demand. Becken et al. (2017) demonstrated the negative impact of air pollution on China’s destination image following from potential tourists’ heightened concerns about travel risks related to poor air quality.

Even though research on air pollution has garnered increasing attention in tourism, extant work has mainly focused on the effect of air pollution on macro-level variables in the tourism industry, such as aggregate tourism demand, local economies, and destination image. An investigation into the impact of air pollution from tourists’ perspectives at the individual level has yet to be conducted. As an unfavorable weather condition, air pollution should inevitably reduce tourists’ motivations to visit polluted destinations; compromise tourists’ activity engagement; and impair visibility, thus obscuring beautiful scenery (Poudyal, Paudel, and Green 2013). Studies in psychology and economics have recently begun to examine the effect of air pollution on individuals’ psychological states and subsequent responses (Q. Li and Peng 2016; Lu et al. 2018; Saenz-de-Miera and Rosselló 2014). Some research has shown that air pollution can lead to criminal and unethical activities because it increases people’s anxiety (Lu et al. 2018). However, it is still necessary to explore other consequences of air pollution in tourism domains. In this study, we extend current findings using a novel perspective: we focus on how air pollution influences tourists’ interactions with other individuals—specifically in terms of travelers’ mental state of suspicion during service provider encounters—in the tourism context.

The Effect of Air Pollution on Tourists’ Social Suspicion

Social suspicion is defined as a state in which people doubt others’ trustworthiness (Kramer 1994). Although social suspicion can lead to deliberative thinking and more accurate judgments (Vonk 1999), the paranoid cognition model (Kramer 1999) posits that individuals may sometimes be irrationally suspicious of targets’ motives and intentions. For instance, individuals may mistakenly perceive a conspiracy based on unrelated events (Main, Dhal, and Darke 2007). Individuals may also develop a sinister attribution bias (Kramer 1994) in which they infer that people they have encountered intentionally produced negative outcomes (e.g., cheating), even though these outcomes actually happened by chance.

The concept of social suspicion is relevant to tourism for many reasons. First, the tourist–service provider relationship could be severely compromised by suspicion. The tourism context is an environment of strangers (Greenblat and Gagnon 1983); tourists and local service providers usually have no contact before tourists visit a destination, such that the basis of relationship between tourists and service providers is not strong by nature. In light of this fact, cultivating a solid tourist–service provider relationship without social suspicion is essential but challenging. However, previous tourism research primarily focused on the variables leading to high trust of sellers (see a review by Wang et al. 2014), in hotels and restaurants (Bowen and Shoemaker 2003), in tourism-related websites (Gregori, Daniele, and Altinay 2014), or in tourism institutions (Nunkoo, Ramkissoon, and Gursoy 2012). In contrast, little research has examined the variables leading to high social suspicion in tourism, the opposite side of high trust. Psychologists have found that social suspicion would inhibit interpersonal transactions and cooperation (Fox 1974; Kramer 1994; Granovetter 1985). More importantly, irrational social suspicion may persistently distort individuals’ perceptions and judgments (Main, Dahl, and Darke 2007). In the tourism industry, the negative consequences of tourists’ suspicion may undermine word of mouth for local service providers in the long run. Therefore, it is important to identify possible causes of irrational social suspicion to enable service providers to take measures to protect their reputations.

Many researchers have investigated how social or physical environments might trigger people’s social suspicion. Lee and Schwarz (2012) discovered that people were more likely to express suspicion on exposure to fishy smells in the environment. Kang et al. (2010) found physical temperature to be associated with people’s willingness to trust or be suspicious of others. Lunardo and Mbengue (2013) noted that consumers would be suspicious of retailers’ integrity when they inferred manipulative intent from the retail environment. In the present study, we propose that air pollution, as a type of sociophysical environmental cue, can magnify tourists’ suspicion of service providers. Furthermore, we suggest that this effect occurs because tourists experience greater pessimism when staying in destinations with heavy air pollution.

The Effect of Air Pollution on Tourists’ Social Suspicion: The Mediating Role of Felt Pessimism

Pessimism refers to a psychological state in which people lose hope and hold negative presumptions about potential outcomes (Beck et al. 1974; Scheier and Carver 1985; A. X. Yang and Urminsky 2015). Although prior research has often regarded pessimism as a trait (Scheier, Carver, and Bridges 1994), recent findings suggest that temporary pessimistic states can be induced by incidental factors (A. X. Yang and Urminsky 2015). Scholars have hinted at the potential impact of heavy air pollution on individuals’ felt pessimism. For example, air pollution has been associated with individuals exhibiting more depression symptoms (Lim et al. 2012; Szyszkowicz 2007) and stronger suicidal ideation (A. C. Yang, Tsai, and Huang 2011). It should be noted that, although exhibiting pessimism-related responses, people may not realize the impact of air pollution on their felt pessimism when making responses, unless they are explicitly asked to think about it. For example, prior work suggests that air pollution can lead people to make pessimistic decisions and judgments in unrelated domains, including less engagement in financial behaviors (Q. Li and Peng 2016; Zhang, Jiang, and Guo 2016), showing that air pollution can influence people’s felt pessimism and subsequent responses unconsciously. Therefore, in this study, we propose that tourists’ perceptions of higher air pollution will induce more felt pessimism, even though they are not aware of such impact.

Previous research has also provided clues regarding the linkage between felt pessimism and social suspicion. Plomin et al. (1992) found that pessimism was positively correlated with paranoid cognition, which involved social suspicion of others. Kramer (1994) contended that irrational suspicion, such as sinister attribution, was due to a pessimistic attributional style. In this study, we suggest that higher felt pessimism might induce more social suspicion.

Drawing on the feeling-as-information theory (Schwarz 2012), people’s judgments can be influenced by feelings arising from incidental sources (e.g., weather or other environmental factors), even when the target of judgment is irrelevant to these sources. We propose that perceptions of heavy air pollution in a destination can lead tourists to experience more pessimistic feelings. On the basis of the feeling-as-information theory, tourists are more likely to rely on such feelings as cues when evaluating service providers and thus become more suspicious of providers. Therefore, we propose the following two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Perceived high (vs. low) air pollution in a destination leads tourists to become more suspicious of local service providers.

Hypothesis 2: This proposed effect is mediated by increased pessimism among tourists.

To Attenuate the Proposed Effect: The Moderating Role of Tourists’ Awareness

In this study, we also aim to examine a moderator of the proposed effect. Specifically, we strive to determine when the effect of air pollution on tourists’ social suspicion of service providers can be attenuated. This finding is of great theoretical and practical importance. Spencer, Zanna, and Fong (2005) suggested that besides examining mediators, researchers could provide further evidence for an underlying process by using moderation approaches. Drawing on their perspective, if the original effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable changes after researchers intervene directly in the proposed underlying process (i.e., the mediating variable), researchers are more likely to regard this mediating variable as the real underlying mechanism. Second, in the tourism context, uncovering a possible moderator can benefit destination management organizations or local service providers; such information enables these entities to apply this knowledge to attenuate the negative impact of air pollution on tourist–service provider interactions.

In the present work, we presume that whether the effect of air pollution holds depends on tourists’ awareness of the impact of air quality on their pessimistic feelings. More specifically, air pollution will magnify tourists’ suspicion of service providers by increasing travelers’ felt pessimism. If this assumption proves true, then the original effect of air pollution on tourists’ social suspicion will be diminished after we inhibit individuals’ reliance on pessimistic feelings as cues when evaluating local service providers, consistent with the method of Spencer, Zanna, and Fong (2005). Research has shown that if individuals realize their feelings are influenced by incidental cues (e.g., the environment or information), they will be more likely to avoid using such feelings as cues in subsequent judgments (Strack et al. 1993; Shen, Jiang, and Adaval 2009). For example, Shen, Jiang, and Adaval (2009) found that when reminded of the influences of the external environment (e.g., lighting) on people’s feelings, individuals relied less on these feelings when evaluating an advertisement in a subsequent judgment task. In the same vein, we suggest that if tourists are made aware of the impact of air quality on their pessimistic feelings, they will not apply such feelings when evaluating local service providers, thereby reducing tourists’ social suspicion. Accordingly, we propose the following hypothesis.

Hypothesis 3: This proposed effect is diminished when tourists are aware (vs. unaware) of the impact of air quality on their pessimistic feelings.

Figure 1 illustrates the conceptual framework of our research.

Figure 1.

Conceptual framework.

Overview of Studies

We conducted three studies to examine whether higher perceived air pollution arouses greater suspicion of service providers. In the pilot study, we provided initial evidence of the positive association between perceived air pollution and one’s predisposition to be suspicious of others. In study 1, we manipulated perceived air pollution and found that higher perceived air pollution increased tourists’ suspicion of service providers. We also shed light on the mechanism underlying the proposed effect by identifying felt pessimism as the mediator. In study 2, we further tested the underlying mechanism via a moderation approach, demonstrating that the facilitating effect of perceived air pollution on tourists’ social suspicion diminished when tourists were explicitly reminded of the impact of air quality on their pessimistic feelings.

Pilot Study

The pilot study was intended to serve as a preliminary test of the association between perceived air pollution and people’s predisposition to be suspicious. Specifically, we predicted that the more air pollution people perceived in their environment, the more readily they would become suspicious of other individuals.

Method

Participants and design

Participants from the United States were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular online platform for conducting experiments and surveys. More than 500,000 individuals from 190 countries are registered on the platform, helping researchers complete various tasks (Paolacci and Chandler 2014). Amazon Mechanical Turk is widely used in social science research, including in psychology, marketing, and tourism management (e.g., Hwang and Mattila 2018; Wadhwa and Zhang 2014), because it can provide diverse samples (Mason and Suri 2012). Eighty-eight participants (51.1% female, mean age = 36.9 years; see Table 1 for participant profiles) completed the pilot study during the third week of January 2018. This study employed a correlational design.

Table 1.

Participant Profiles for Pilot Study (N = 88).

Characteristic	Percentage
Gender
Male	48.9
Female	51.1
Age, years
18–29	29.5
30–39	36.4
40–49	19.3
50–59	11.4
≥60	3.4
Ethnicity
White	77.3
Hispanic or Latino	4.5
African American	13.6
Asian or Pacific Islander	3.4
Other	1.1

Procedures

All participants needed to complete two ostensibly unrelated surveys. First, they completed a survey about their living conditions. The instrument assessed participants’ perceptions of air pollution using a 5-item measure adapted from Gu et al. (2015), including items such as “I am quite sure air pollution is occurring right now” and “I think the air quality in my local area is getting worse,” scored on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). To disguise the purpose of our research, these items were embedded among other demographic questions, such as those related to gender and age. Next, participants proceeded to the second survey in which we used a 5-item scale to measure participants’ general tendency to be suspicious of other people (e.g., “One is better off being cautious when dealing with strangers until they have provided evidence that they are trustworthy,” “Most salesmen are not completely honest in describing their products”), adapted from Wood, Boles, and Babin (2008). As in the first survey, items were scored on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree).

Results

We averaged the scale items measuring perceived air pollution (α = 0.86) and then averaged the items measuring social suspicion (α = 0.74). Next, we regressed social suspicion on participants’ perceived air pollution. The results revealed a positive association between perceived air pollution and social suspicion: β = 0.25, t(86) = 2.41, p = .018. We also included participants’ age and gender in the regression model as covariates. The effect of perceived air pollution on social suspicion remained robust: β = 0.24, t(84) = 2.37, p = .020. Therefore, these findings support our hypothesis that perceived air pollution increases consumers’ social suspicion.

Discussion

Findings from the pilot study provided preliminary evidence of the association between perceived air pollution and people’s likelihood of being suspicious of others. In the main studies, we directly tested the causal effect of perceived air pollution on social suspicion in the tourism context.

Study 1

Study 1 included three objectives. First, we manipulated (rather than measured) perceived air pollution and examined the causal effect of perceived air pollution on tourists’ suspicion of local service providers. Second, we examined the underlying mechanism of the proposed effect. In particular, we hypothesized that perceived air pollution would increase tourists’ feelings of pessimism, which would then lead to greater social suspicion of service providers. Third, instead of measuring people’s general tendency toward social suspicion, we presented a real travel and consumption scenario to examine how perceived air pollution in the destination city would influence tourists’ interactions with service providers; results provide practical implications for tourism management.

Method

Participants and design

Participants from the United States were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. In total, 135 participants (38.5% female, mean age = 35.3 years; see Table 2 for participant profiles) completed this study during the third week of September 2018. The study adopted a one-factor between-subjects design (air pollution: high vs. low) and the sample size is adequate based on prior experimentation studies in both tourism and marketing (Hwang and Mattila 2018; Iacobucci 1994). Participants were randomly divided into two groups. Participants in different groups received different manipulations of perceived air pollution and indicated their responses via a subsequent service scenario.

Table 2.

Participant Profiles for Study 1 (N = 135).

Characteristic	Percentage
Gender
Male	61.5
Female	38.5
Age, years
18–29	33.3
30–39	40.7
40–49	13.3
50–59	8.9
≥60	3.7
Ethnicity
White	84.4
Hispanic or Latino	3.0
African American	6.7
Asian or Pacific Islander	5.2
Other	0.7

Manipulation of perceived air pollution

Participants first engaged in a mental visualization task, in which we manipulated the level of perceived air pollution. Before starting the task, all participants read a cover story instructing them to visualize traveling to a new city for one week. Participants were shown pictures of the city. In the high-pollution condition, the three pictures showed the city covered in a heavy haze. By contrast, the three pictures in the low-pollution condition displayed fresh air in the city. To strengthen the manipulation of perceived air pollution, we also provided real-time air quality indices (AQIs) in both conditions. Participants in the high- (vs. low-) pollution condition were told the AQI in their destination city was 424 (vs. 15), indicating hazardous (vs. good) air quality. All participants were asked to imagine that they were traveling in the pictured city. Specifically, they were instructed to write down how they would feel when walking in the streets, breathing the air, exploring the city, and so on.

Measurement of tourists’ suspicion

After completing the mental visualization task, participants were told they would read a scenario describing their travel experience in the destination city. Participants read that they went to a local restaurant for dinner and decided to have a steak cooked “medium.” However, when the meal was served, participants found the steak to be slightly undercooked. This scenario was developed on the basis of Hess, Ganesan, and Klein (2003); a sample is provided in Appendix A (Supplemental Material). Next, participants answered a question related to the scenario, through which we measured their suspicion toward the service provider (“Why do you think the above service failure happened?”; 1 = it happened by accident, 7 = it happened because the restaurant did not care about the food quality). A higher score indicated that participants were more likely to be suspicious of the service provider.

Measurement of felt pessimism

Then, participants completed a scale measuring their felt pessimism when viewing images of the city and engaging in the mental visualization task. The scale was adapted from the Life-Orientation Test–Revised (Scheier, Carver, and Bridges 1994; Carver, Lehman, and Antoni 2003). The original scale includes 10 items and measures people’s optimism–pessimism trait; we retained items measuring pessimism and revised the wording slightly to better suit the purpose of our study. The adapted scale consisted of three items (e.g., “At that time, I would feel that when something could go wrong for me, it would”; 1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree), and a higher score reflected more felt pessimism in the moment. After responding to the scale, participants answered a manipulation check question (“How is the air quality in the pictured city in the mental visualization task?”; 1 = very poor, 7 = very good). Finally, they provided their demographic information.

Results

Manipulation check

An independent t-test showed that perceived air quality was better in the low-pollution condition (M = 6.01, SD = 1.16) than in the high-pollution condition (M = 1.57, SD = 1.56): t(133) = 18.86, p < .001, d = 3.25. Therefore, our manipulation of perceived air pollution was effective.

The effect of air pollution on suspicion

An independent t-test revealed that suspicion of the service provider was significantly higher in the high-pollution condition (M = 4.14, SD = 1.75) than in the low-pollution condition (M = 3.43, SD = 1.81): t(133) = 2.32, p = .022, d = 0.40. Therefore, high perceived air pollution (vs. low perceived air pollution) was more likely to lead consumers to be suspicious of the service provider.

Mediation test

To reveal the mechanism underlying this effect, we tested the mediating role of felt pessimism. We first averaged the three items measuring felt pessimism during the mental visualization task (α = 0.88). Next, we coded the air pollution condition (1 = high, 0 = low) and then conducted path analyses and a bootstrap analysis (Preacher and Hayes 2008; Zhao, Lynch, and Chen 2010). The path analyses showed that air pollution was positively associated with suspicion (β = 0.20, t[133] = 2.32, p = .022) and positively associated with felt pessimism (β = 0.33, t[133] = 3.97, p < .001). When we included air pollution and felt pessimism as predictors and suspicion as the dependent variable, the effect of felt pessimism remained significant (β = 0.36, t[132] = 4.27, p < .001), whereas the effect of air pollution became nonsignificant (β = 0.08, t[132] = 0.94, p > .30) (Figure 2). Thus, felt pessimism mediated the effect of air pollution on tourists’ suspicion. In addition, we conducted a bootstrap analysis using PROCESS macro Model 4 with 5,000 bootstrapping samples (Preacher and Hayes 2008). Results revealed that the effect of perceived air pollution on social suspicion was significantly mediated by felt pessimism (indirect effect = 0.42, SE = 0.14, 95% CI 0.20, 0.73, excluding zero). These findings support our hypothesis.

Figure 2.

The effect of air pollution on suspicion mediated by felt pessimism.

Discussion

The results of study 1 replicated those of the pilot study. By testing causality, study 1 indicated that perceived air pollution increased tourists’ suspicion of the service provider when encountering service failures. More importantly, we unveiled the underlying mechanism by demonstrating the mediating effect of felt pessimism when tourists stayed in an area with high air pollution. In addition, as we discussed in the previous part, participants may not realize the impact of air pollution on their felt pessimism, before they are explicitly asked to report it. An analysis of participants’ responses in the writing task (i.e., manipulation of air pollution) revealed that in the high-pollution condition, people primarily talked about three issues. Specifically, around 50% of participants showed health concerns (e.g., “unhealthy” and “sick”), more than 40% of them presented their coping behaviors (e.g., “buying masks” and “increasing indoor activities”), and above 60% of them expressed negative mood (e.g., “worry” and “uncomfortable”) when describing their feelings and experiences regarding the high-pollution destination. However, they seldom directly talked about their felt pessimism, which is consistent with our reasoning. Therefore, in the subsequent study, we sought to find out if increasing tourists’ awareness of the impact of air pollution would work as a moderator and provide further evidence of this boundary effect.

Study 2

Study 2 had two objectives: first, we adopted a different service type and replicated the findings of our previous studies to enhance generalizability; second, instead of using a mediation test, we employed a moderation approach as suggested by Spencer, Zanna, and Fong (2005) to examine felt pessimism as the underlying mechanism and demonstrate increasing tourists’ awareness as an intervention strategy. This approach was intended to directly intervene with the underlying mechanism (i.e., felt pessimism) and observe whether the original effect (i.e., the impact of perceived air pollution on social suspicion) would be diminished or even reversed. Based on previous literature (Newman and Uleman 1990; Jacoby et al. 1989; Strack et al. 1993), once people are reminded of the impacts of incidental factors on their feelings (i.e., increasing awareness), they tend to rely less on these feelings as cues when making subsequent judgments. Therefore, if felt pessimism acts as the underlying mechanism, reminding participants that such feelings are influenced by air quality should prevent them from relying on these feelings when evaluating local service providers. Therefore, the proposed effect of air pollution on tourists’ social suspicion should be effectively attenuated.

Method

Participants and design

Participants from the United States were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. In total, 284 participants (39.8% female, mean age = 36.29 years; see Table 3 for participant profiles) completed this study during the second week of October 2018. The study employed a 2 (air pollution: high vs. low) × 2 (awareness of the impact of air quality: yes vs. no) between-subjects design. Participants were randomly divided into four groups and received different manipulations depending on the condition.

Table 3.

Participant Profiles for Study 2 (N = 284).

Characteristic	Percentage
Gender
Male	60.2
Female	39.8
Age
18–29	35.2
30–39	36.3
40–49	14.1
50–59	7.7
≥60	6.7
Education
Less than high school	0.7
High school graduate	9.5
College	21.8
Bachelor’s degree	50.4
Master	15.1
Professional degree	1.8
Doctorate	0.7
Annual household income
<$20,000	7.0
$20,000–$39,999	28.9
$40,000–$59,999	26.8
$60,000–$79,999	19.4
$80,000–$99,999	9.5
≥$100,000	8.5
Ethnicity
White	72.9
Hispanic or Latino	7.0
African American	12.0
Asian or Pacific Islander	5.6
Other	2.5

Manipulation of perceived air pollution

Participants first engaged in a mental visualization task in which we manipulated the perceived air pollution level. Specifically, we asked participants to imagine they were visiting a new city for one week. All participants were shown screenshots of a weather forecasting app and a local website describing the city during their stay. In the high- (vs. low-) pollution condition, the app revealed that the air quality index was 424 (vs. 15), indicating poor (vs. good) air quality. In the high- (vs. low-) pollution condition, the local website’s banner announced that the city was stuck in a haze (vs. had fresh air) during the week. In order to strengthen the manipulation of perceived air pollution, we showed participants pictures of a real city, adapted from previous literature (Lu et al. 2018). Similar to study 1, we asked participants to write down how they would feel when visiting this city.

Manipulation of tourists’ awareness of the impact of air quality

In the awareness condition, participants received additional information from the local website. Specifically, they were told that researchers had discovered that air quality influenced how optimistic or pessimistic individuals were. Then participants were asked to provide a brief example supporting this proposition. In the no awareness condition, participants did not receive these instructions. Manipulation of perceived air pollution and tourists’ awareness can be found in Appendix B (Supplemental Material).

Measurement of social suspicion

Next, all participants read a scenario detailing their travel experience in this city. They imagined they stayed in a hotel in the city and used a third-party website to book an air ticket to their next destination. The website promised that customers would receive a booking confirmation in no more than 24 hours. However, participants waited 25 hours until finally receiving the flight confirmation, which exceeded the maximum waiting time the third-party website promised. The script of the scenario is presented in Appendix C (Supplemental Material). Next, participants completed a 2-item measure to indicate their suspicion about the booking website (i.e., “I am worried if my booking actually exists even though I finally received the flight confirmation”; 1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree; “Why do you think the above delayed booking confirmation happened?” 1 = it happened by accident, 7 = it happened because the third-party website overclaimed their service quality). After that, participants answered demographic questions and the same manipulation check question included in study 1.

Results

Manipulation check

We ran a 2 (air pollution: high vs. low) × 2 (awareness of the impact of air quality: yes vs. no) analysis of variance (ANOVA) to examine whether the manipulation of air pollution was effective. Results revealed a significant main effect of air pollution, F(1, 280) = 201.64, p < .001, η_p² = 0.42. Neither the main effect of awareness manipulation nor the interaction effect between air pollution and awareness was significant, p’s > .20. Therefore, our manipulation of perceived air pollution was successful and not influenced by the awareness manipulation.

Social suspicion

We averaged the two items measuring participants’ social suspicion of the service provider (r = 0.36, p < .001). A 2 (air pollution: high vs. low) × 2 (awareness of the impact of air quality: yes vs. no) ANOVA with social suspicion as the dependent variable revealed nonsignificant main effects of air pollution and awareness manipulation, p’s > .40. More importantly, the interaction effect of air pollution and awareness manipulation was significant, F(1, 280) = 13.41, p < .001, η_p² = 0.05 (Figure 3). Planned contrasts showed that when participants were not aware of the impact of air quality on their pessimistic feelings, suspicion of the service provider was significantly higher in the high-pollution condition (M = 5.38, SD = 1.20) than in the low-pollution condition (M = 4.93, SD = 1.22): t(280) = 2.17, p = .031, d = 0.37. By contrast, when participants were aware of the impact of air quality, the effect was reversed. Suspicion of the service provider was significantly lower in the high-pollution condition (M = 4.95, SD = 1.36) than in the low-pollution condition (M = 5.58, SD = 1.09): t(280) = 3.01, p = .003, d = 0.50. These results support our hypothesis by revealing felt pessimism as the underlying mechanism and increasing tourists’ awareness as an intervention strategy.

Figure 3.

The moderating effect of tourists’ awareness.

Discussion

The findings of study 2 support hypotheses 1 and 2. First, results show that perceived high air pollution can lead tourists to suspect the local service provider, replicating the findings of the pilot study and study 1. More importantly, through the moderation approach, study 2 offers further evidence of the mediating role of felt pessimism. These findings also provide important practical implications for destination management organizations and local service providers. Specifically, when tourists have the opportunity to learn about the possible impact of air quality on their pessimistic feelings, they will be less likely to apply pessimistic feelings when evaluating local service providers, which can effectively weaken the original effect of air pollution on social suspicion. This phenomenon can inform cost-effective measures to maintain relationships between tourists and service providers during periods of air pollution.

Discussion and Conclusions

Weather and climate are important factors in the tourism industry, and air quality is an integral aspect of weather and climate. Surprisingly, little is known about the empirical relationship between air quality and tourists. The current research fills this gap by investigating how air pollution can influence individual tourists’ interactions with service providers in a destination. Through three studies, our findings indicate that (1) tourists are more likely to be suspicious of local service providers when a destination has high (vs. low) air pollution; (2) this effect is mediated by tourists’ feelings of pessimism; and (3) this effect can be diminished when tourists are reminded of the impact of air quality on their feelings.

The present research contributes to the literature and tourism practices. First of all, this work provides a novel perspective regarding the linkage between air pollution and tourism research. Previous studies tended to focus on the macro impact of air quality on tourism demand, whereas limited attention was paid to the effect of air quality on individual tourists (Anaman and Looi 2000; Kavallinis and Pizam 1994; Saenz-de-Miera and Rosselló 2014). Air quality, as well as other weather or climate factors, is essential when tourists select travel destinations and continues to influence tourists’ experiences during a trip; environmental characteristics are key determinants of tourists’ trip evaluations. Tourists visiting long-haul destinations are especially intent on taking full advantage of their visits and will generally not shorten or cancel planned activities because of air pollution; thus, they are often aware of the air quality they will encounter and are well prepared to cope with it. However, these tourists may not realize how their psychological states and responses are shaped by air pollution on arrival. Given the paucity of research on the impact of air pollution on tourists’ destination experiences, travelers are especially vulnerable to adverse psychological reactions due to air pollution without any awareness. The present study bridges these research gaps by paying particular attention to the impact of air pollution on tourists’ interactions with service providers, an important part of their experiences, to deepen our understanding of air pollution in the tourism context.

Second, this article explores tourists’ social suspicion, which plays a prominent role in tourism research. Social suspicion, especially irrational suspicion (Kramer 1994), is detrimental to customer relationship management and word of mouth. For example, destination management organizations must invest more resources to salvage their reputations once tourists experience negative feelings or become suspicious of service providers. Also, when tourists are suspicious of service providers, they may reduce their consumption and be less likely to establish any commitment to a destination, leading to lower revisit intention. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of studying social suspicion in tourism, prior work has seldom investigated this topic, especially the antecedents of social suspicion. Our findings indicate that environmental antecedents, such as air pollution, can indeed arouse tourists’ suspicion.

Third, by testing the mediator and moderator of the proposed effect, we reveal the underlying process (i.e., feeling of pessimism) through which air pollution influences tourists’ suspicion along with the boundary (i.e., tourists’ awareness) of how the effect could be attenuated. The current research hence extends beyond merely examining the impact of air pollution on tourists to provide theoretical justification for the mediating role (i.e., feeling of pessimism) and, more importantly, proves it empirically. Investigation of the underlying mechanism contributes to tourism research and enhances our understanding of individuals’ psychological responses to air pollution in general psychology. Moreover, the moderator in our study can inform strategies to prevent the negative effect of air pollution, which carries valuable managerial implications for destination management organizations. Increasing tourists’ awareness was found to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use strategy. To elicit the effect, destinations could apply such strategies to information provision via mobile apps and websites and incorporate this information into the design of other destination materials, such as maps, promotional leaflets, and speeches from tour guides.

The current study takes an initial step toward understanding the role of air pollution on individuals in the tourism industry by using an experimental design. Despite its revelations, this study also has some limitations that present new avenues for future research. First, our findings provide preliminary empirical evidence of tourists’ psychological responses under air pollution conditions. Future research could consider investigating other tourist responses and behaviors along with corresponding mechanisms when encountering severe weather, such as air pollution. For example, the data of the open-ended questions in study 1 have shown that tourists’ responses toward heavy air pollution involve (1) various coping behaviors, (2) health concerns, and (3) negative mood. Future research can explore how these fundamental issues regarding air pollution and travelers can influence subsequent tourist behavior as well as destination management strategies. Second, to ensure high internal validity, we conducted controlled experiments to test the causal effect of perceived air pollution on social suspicion. Subsequent studies could use big data and field studies to test relevant research questions using a larger sample and provide more external validity. Third, our research focused on tourists’ social suspicion of service providers. Future work can take these findings a step further and show how the results may spill over to other domains of the tourist experience, such as tourists’ word of mouth and customer loyalty. In addition, we only investigated social suspicion in tourist–service provider interactions in this study; other types of social suspicion in tourism contexts (e.g., social suspicion induced by environmental factors or peer tourists) can be explored in the future. For example, future research can consider how environmental factors may influence tourists’ suspicion of online information, such as customer reviews (Papathanassis and Knolle 2011) and news posted on social media (Jun, Meng, and Johar 2017). Finally, it would be interesting for scholars to explore other strategies to minimize the negative effect of air pollution on tourists beyond increasing travelers’ awareness.

In summary, this study is particularly valuable for destinations sensitive to air pollution. Air pollution is a common threat in many urban locations, whereas destinations known for their natural beauty are often thought to be less affected by air pollution. Contrary to popular belief, research (e.g., Poudyal, Paudel, and Green 2013) has revealed that many popular national parks in the United States also face the problem of air pollution. This research is thus widely applicable and of ongoing importance.

Supplemental Material

Revised_20190626_Supplementary_Materials – Supplemental material for Tourists and Air Pollution: How and Why Air Pollution Magnifies Tourists’ Suspicion of Service Providers

Supplemental material, Revised_20190626_Supplementary_Materials for Tourists and Air Pollution: How and Why Air Pollution Magnifies Tourists’ Suspicion of Service Providers by Ke Zhang, Yuansi Hou, Gang Li and Yunhui Huang in Journal of Travel Research

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number: 71802125] awarded to the first author.

ORCID iDs

Ke Zhang

Yuansi Hou

Gang Li

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Ke Zhang is an Assistant Professor of marketing in the SHU-UTS SILC Business School at Shanghai University, Shanghai, China. His research interests include cognitive processes underlying consumer and manager decision making, including belief, inference, and reasoning.

Yuansi Hou is a Senior Lecturer in marketing in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research interests are mainly in the area of consumer psychology, and hospitality and tourism marketing by using experimental design.

Gang Li is a Professor of tourism economics in the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. His research interests include economic analysis of tourism demand, destination competitiveness, quantitative research methods for tourism studies and Chinese economic issues.

Yunhui Huang is a visiting Assistant Professor of marketing in Business School at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include ecological factors that can influence consumer decision making (e.g., disease salience, crowding) as well as affect and emotions.

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