What to Do on Spring Break?

By Derrick Wirtz, Justin Kruger, Christie Napa Scollon, E. Diener. Psychology Science, 2003

669 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When individuals choose future activities on the basis of their past experiences, what guides those choices? The present study compared students' predicted, on-line, and remembered spring-break experiences, as well as the influence of these factors on students' desire to take a similar vacation in the future. Predicted and remembered experiences were both more positive—and, paradoxically, more negative—than on-line experiences. Of key importance, path analyses revealed that remembered experience, but neither on-line nor anticipated experience, directly predicted the desire to repeat the experience. These results suggest that although on-line measures may be superior to retrospective measures for approximating objective experience, retrospective measures may be superior for predicting choice.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80fc60ff07c56da6b38665a5db89dd56f2ba03bd

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Citations in the corpus

Tourists' memories, sensory impressions and loyalty: in loco and post-visit study in Southwest Portugal (2017, positive): “, 2014; Pan & Ryan, 2009; Pine & Gilmore, 1998) and that remembered experiences may be better predictors of future behavior than the experience reported in loco (Mitchell et al., 1997; Wirtz et al., 2003).”
Measuring Teachers’ enjoyment, anger, and anxiety: The Teacher Emotions Scales (TES) (2016, background): “…for general well-being and also have important behavioral implications (e.g., teachers’ intentions to quit, Klassen & Chiu, 2011) – in fact, some researchers have argued that trait emotions matter even more than state emotions, for example with respect to decision making (Wirtz et al., 2003).”
Global and Episodic Reports of Hedonic Experience (2006, background): “Ironically, this turns faulty indicators of experience into good predictors of future choices and behaviors (e.g., Wirtz et al., 2003 ).”
Development of a Scale to Measure Memorable Tourism Experiences (2010, background): “Researchers have suggested that memory, which mediates behavioral intentions (Kozak 2001; Lehto, O’Leary, and Morrison 2004; Mazursky 1989; Wirtz et al. 2003), needs to be incorporated into the study of customer experiences.”
World happiness report (2012, neutral): “Wirtz et al. (2003).”
Measuring Emotions in Real Time (2015, background): “As such, many tourism studies have been conducted to examine the role of emotions and to measure them within various touristic settings (Bigné and Andreu 2004; del Bosque and Martin 2008; Hosany and Gilbert 2010; Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick 2012; Yuksel, Yuksel, and Bilim 2010; Wirtz et al. 2003).”
Reconsidering happiness: the costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia (2008, positive): “People’s expectations of how an event is going to impact them differs from thoughts and feelings during the event itself which differs from retrospective evaluations of the event in terms of associations with various indicators of wellbeing (Wirtz et al., 2003).”