By Pan Jingyi, Principal Writer, China Business Knowledge@CUHK

After weathering years of crippling travel restrictions, the tourism industry is finally on the road to recovery with travellers eagerly rushing to book flights and hotels. According to a recent Travel Pulse 2023 survey by travel platform Klook, one in three millennials and Gen Z across the Asia Pacific are ready to spend at least US$2,000 for their next holidays, which is more than double the average monthly income in Asia.

While both work and travel are two essential aspects of modern life, there are inconsistent views on whether they are opposing domains. Some research found that leisure and travel may be positively associated with one’s work efficiency through stress recovery and self-development. In contrast, other studies found that leisure activities may negatively influence work performance due to the consumption of time and energy.

“We demonstrate that merely recalling one’s tourism memory, even from a long time ago, can increase creativity.”

Prof. Lisa Wan

A new study titled How tourism memory boosts creativity? The role of openness to experience conducted by Lisa Wan, Associate Professor and Acting Director of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School, and her PhD student Hu Jihao, have solved this riddle.

Prof. Wan and Hu investigated whether tourism memory has positive influences on individuals’ work performance, as well as the mechanisms behind it. They found that recalling tourism-related memories can promote creativity.

“The spillover effect of tourism memory retrieval on creativity suggests that the mere recall of one’s tourism memory can momentarily activate a higher level of state openness, which would, in turn, spillover to individuals’ changes in creativity performance,” says Prof. Wan.

Uniqueness of Tourism Memory

Many psychological studies have shown that memory plays a significant role in leveraging creativity, as impaired memory function can lead to poor creative performance. On the other hand, while many other studies have explored the negative effects of work-leisure conflict, they tend to predominantly examine the immediate consequences of travel rather than its long-term implications. Building on these theoretical foundations, Prof. Wan and her collaborator proposed that tourism memory retrieval facilitates creativity.

While various types of memories exist, why is tourism memory particularly important in this context? The uniqueness and unpredictability of tourism memory allow it to differentiate from other routine memories. Prof. Wan notes that travel memories have unique qualities, which makes individuals more open-minded compared to ordinary memories, or other affectively positive memories.

“Tourism memory is in fact a type of autobiographical memory about one’s tourism experiences, while it possesses two unique characteristics differentiated from other autobiographical memories in general – social nature and vividness,” says Prof. Wan.

The researchers then proposed their second hypothesis, suggesting that the effect of tourism memory retrieval on creativity is mediated by increased openness to experience.

Effects of Tourism Memory Retrieval

To examine the causal relationship between tourism memory retrieval and creativity, the team randomly assigned the participants to either tourism, ordinary, or an affectively positive memory group. In this experiment, participants were asked to finish a writing task to describe the details of their past tourism, ordinary, or luck memory. After that, they needed to answer questions that were designed to measure their level of openness to experiences at that moment.

The participants were then required to finish a creative task in which they had to devise innovative solutions for a new business idea in a cafeteria setting. After completion, the researchers recruited two independent coders to the experiment to rate each response.

Consistent with their hypotheses, the results showed that participants in the tourism memory recall group displayed a higher creativity score than those in either the ordinary or affectively positive memory group, thus ruling out the positive affect as the alternative account. Additionally, the result of the openness test also indicated that participants in the tourism memory group exhibited a higher level of openness than their counterparts in either the ordinary or affectively positive memory group.

“We demonstrated that the effect of tourism memory, compared to the ordinary or affectively positive memory, retrieval on individuals’ creativity is derived from the social nature and vividness that tourism memories feature,” says Prof. Wan. “Theoretically speaking, in this regard, tourism experiences with a higher level of social interactions, social sharing, and vividness may exert a stronger reminiscence effect than others.”

Moderating Role of Trait Openness

The team took a step further to test the moderating role of trait openness. Compared to a state of openness, which is temporary, the trait of openness refers to an individual’s personality that is inclined to explore new ideas and engage in novel experiences. Openness is one of the “Big Five” personality traits and is connected to qualities such as curiosity and imagination. These attributes are crucial in shaping creativity.

Most of the steps in this experiment were the same as the previous one, but instead of measuring openness at a particular moment, researchers focused on the enduring characteristics. More specifically, participants were asked to rate their trait openness using the Big Five personality measure after finishing the creativity task.

The result replicated the positive effect of tourism memory retrieval on participants’ creativity, but the more important thing is that the researchers identified the boundary condition.

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“The impact of tourism memory retrieval on creativity was stronger among those with lower trait openness than those with higher trait openness,” says Prof. Wan. “This is because as people with higher trait openness are already substantially associated with better creativity performance, recalling tourism memories may then exert less incremental influence.”

Leveraging Tourism Memory in the Workplace

While travel may have some short-term side effects on work performance, the researchers argue that it can contribute to individual and organisational success in the longer post-trip stage.

“We demonstrate that merely recalling one’s tourism memory, even from a long time ago, can increase creativity,” says Prof. Wan.

As creativity is highly associated with organisational functioning and efficiency and employees’ problem-solving skills, these findings provide practical implications for individuals, organisational managers, and even marketers.

“At the individual level, creativity can augment people’s well-being, including their mental health and happiness,” says Prof. Wan. “At the organisational level, creativity can improve employees’ job performance and organisational success.”

Given the positive impact of retrieving tourism memories on individuals’ creativity, Prof. Wan suggests that organisations may promote work-leisure integration by encouraging employees to bring souvenirs or crafts from their vacations into the workplace or organise company travel activities. Similarly, employees can keep travel photos in the office, while travel companies can emphasise the benefits of travel memories when promoting travel packages.

Prof. Wan concludes that this new research provides novel insights into the discussion of work-leisure conflict. However, whether an increase in creativity in the experimental context could translate into creativity in actual job performance warrants more attention in future studies.

“Future researchers could conduct a field experiment in a real organisational setting, where leaders assess employees’ creativity performance and compare their differences,” she adds.

The post Throwing Back Travel Memories to Boost Creativity first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

By Jaymee Ng, Principal Writer, China Business Knowledge@CUHK

Subjective Time Perception

The researchers conducted three experiments involving hundreds of residents in the U.S. In the first experiment, the participants were divided into two groups. One group was provided a list of news events that occurred in the past 20 years while the other group was given a list of news events that happened in the past year. First, both groups were asked to select the news events that were the most and least important. Then, they were told to freely recall a past vacation and indicate how long ago the vacation actually happened and how far away it feels to them.

Interestingly, the participants who read the news events over the past 20 years felt their vacations to be significantly more recent than those who were told to select the news events from the past year, despite the fact that the former group recalled vacations that were objectively more distant in the past than the latter group did.

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In the second experiment, the participants were again divided into two groups and were told to list four sports activities that they had done in two years and in the past month respectively. Then, they were told to recall a dining experience and describe how far away the experience feels to them. In addition, they were asked how much they missed the food or dining at that restaurant.

Similar to the results of the first experiment, those who were told to list their sports activities in the past two years felt their dining experiences to be more recent than those who listed their sports activities in the past month, even though the recalled dining experiences were actually farther away in time in the former condition than in the latter condition. The group that felt their dining experiences to be more distant missed their dining experience significantly more than their counterparts who didn’t feel that way.

“Memory is a powerful marketing tool but only when you know how to use it properly. These experiments reveal that we can actually manipulate how far away people feel about their memories and influence their craving for particular consumption experiences,” Prof. Dai says.

The Age Factor

In the third experiment, Prof. Dai and his co-author looked at the influence of age on how people perceive their past experiences. The participants, aged from 18 to 73, were asked to recall a memorable vacation in the past and indicate how long ago the experience felt to them. Separately, they were told to describe how easy, vivid and frequent was it to recall the vacation experience.

According to the results, older participants tend to have more vivid memories than younger participants. Also, older people tend to recall memories in a longer time frame and they perceive their past experiences to be more recent. In addition, the study points out that the habit of searching for memories in a longer time frame also seem to be the reason why time appears to pass more quickly as people age.

“This difference in memory recalling pattern among different age groups may provide a fresh perspective for marketers when targeting customers. It’s also something that should be relevant across markets and cultures because what we captured is basic human nature,” Prof. Dai says.

Regarding the overall results, the researchers explain that studies have previously suggested that both the objective and subjective passage of time (the difference between the actual amount of measurable time that has passed versus how much time a person has perceived to have passed) play a role in driving consumer preferences. However, they add that this latest study presents clearer evidence that subjective time can actually play a more critical role in how consumers make purchase decisions and their preferences.

“When people contemplate making purchases that provide them with pleasurable experiences, be it a relaxing spa or going to watch a movie, one of the first things they implicitly do is to ask themselves when was the last time they did something like this,” says Prof. Dai. “How they respond to this internal dialogue can make a big difference in whether they decide to follow through or not,” he says, adding that if advertisers are able to trigger consumers to search their memories over a shorter time frame, this can make a past consumption feel like it happened a longer time ago, and would make it more likely for them to make a repeat purchase.

Crafting the Right Field Tactic

For this reason, this memory search effect could have a substantial influence in maintaining customer loyalty as well as how well a consumer feels as a result of a purchase experience, and it is important for marketing professionals to seriously consider this when designing promotional programmes, Prof. Dai says.

“The basic idea is to just to get the consumer to think more about the recent past as opposed to events that happen much longer ago,” he adds. “In this study, we’ve shown that it is possible to manipulate the time frame that a consumer would search as part of their decision-making process. We hope that marketing professionals would be able to develop and implement similar tactics in the field.”

For future research, both professors admit that a deeper understanding of the memory retrieval mechanism is needed to fully explain the phenomenon that they have discovered in the study.

“How one retrieves memory is an intricate matter. One of the things that we also found was that when we tried to manipulate the memory recall time frame after asking the participants to think about a past event, it did not affect their perception of time the same way it did in the three experiments we did where the memory search manipulation happened before the recall event,” Prof. Dai says. “We believe future research can venture into this particular area and should harvest some meaningful findings.”

The post The Power of Memory in Stimulating Purchases first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

By Si Kao, PhD Candidate, Department of Marketing, CUHK Business School

Those of us who watched the Hollywood hit movie, La La Land, which focuses on a bitter-sweet love affair between a musician and an aspiring actress, may have been reminded of experiences we had with a former boyfriend or girlfriend.

When talking to colleagues and friends, they all agreed that their past experiences with their former partners – whether taking a vacation in Bali, for example, or going out for dinner, having a fight, or just a conversation – feel particularly remote now. Why is this?

Research has shown that the vividness of a past trip and the emotions associated with it can influence people’s perceptions of when it took place. But can our perceived future also influence our past memories?

The findings of my published paper, “Looking Forward and Looking Back: The Likelihood of an Event’s Future Reoccurrence Affects Perceptions of the Time It Occurred in the Past”, in collaboration with Visiting Professor Robert Wyer and Associate Professor Dai Xianchi from the Department of Marketing at CUHK Business School, may provide some useful answers to these questions.

Looking at a past trip and its possible reoccurrence

In our research, we considered another determinant – the likelihood of the event occurring again. Specifically, we suggested that people consider past events to be more distant if the chance of their reoccurrence is low.

A past vacation in Bali, for example, seems more remote to people if they will never go there again, rather than if they are likely to return next year.

We based such a hypothesis on two assumptions: First, that people believe a future event to be more imminent if there is high – rather than low – likelihood of it occurring. Second, people’s perceptions of when a former event will reoccur have a positive influence on their judgments about when it previously took place.

The Studies

More than 1,300 people took part in six studies. In one of the studies, we asked participants to recall the most recent New Year’s Eve they spent in a location other than their hometown or place of residence and write down where they went, the people they were with and what they did.

We also asked them to rate how long ago it felt since the event occurred, using a scale from 1 (feels like yesterday/feels very close) to 9 (feels very far away/feels very distant); the likelihood of them returning there and meeting the same people, also on a scale from 1 (not at all feasible) to 9 (very feasible); and things such as how vivid and emotional their memories were.

As a result, we found evidence that participants regarded a past event that was unlikely to reoccur as being more distant.

In another study, participants were questioned about a past vacation and how distant it felt to them today; they were also asked to estimate the number of years before they would take another trip to the same place.

We found that participants who were made to think that the future holiday was unlikely ended up estimating a longer period till when they would make a return trip. They also estimated the time since their past vacation to be longer when they felt it was very unlikely that the future holiday would reoccur.

In the final study, involving fixed events in the future, took place about 12 months before the 2016 Rio Olympics. We manipulated participants’ judgments about how long it was until the start of the next Summer Games by first focusing their attention on either a near or a distant sports event.

Half of the participants were asked to think first about the coming NBA finals – only three weeks away at the time – which led them to regard the approaching Olympics as relatively distant.

The other half was asked to think first about the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia – then three years away – which led them to view that the forthcoming Olympics as closer.

Participants were then asked to indicate how long it seemed since the last Olympics had taken place.

Logic might suggest that the more imminent the next Olympics are then the more time that has elapsed since the previous Games. But people’s answers contradicted this: The farther away participants felt the next Olympics to be, the farther away they also felt the last Olympics to be.

“People may want to distance themselves from a past event that was desirable, but was nevertheless unlikely to occur again, to reduce feelings of wistfulness.”

So What Did We Discover?

Research has shown that people’s memories and appraisal of the past can be influenced by their current goals, motivations, and beliefs.

However, to our knowledge few studies have investigated whether people’s perceptions of the future can affect their judgments of the time an event occurred in the past.

Our studies found that a past event is perceived to have occurred more recently if it is likely – rather than unlikely – to reoccur.

The results suggest an event’s likelihood of reoccurring influences the perception of the time it will occur in future and that this perception, in turn, affects judgments about when the event took place in the past.

It should be noted that we focused our studies almost exclusively on positive events, not things that could stir up negative feelings, such as a trip to the dentist or a car accident.

Also special or extraordinary personal events, such as a wedding, were not examined. Based on the current findings, we speculate that the observed effect may be reduced, for both negative and special events, because people rarely anticipate or consider they will reoccur in the future.

Other explanations may also explain our current findings. One interesting idea is that people may want to distance themselves from a past event that was desirable, but was nevertheless unlikely to occur again, to reduce feelings of wistfulness. Such an alternative suggestion is not incompatible with the findings of our research.

Practical Implications of Our Findings

Our research could prove useful to marketers and retailers in future advertising campaigns because of the crucial role that memory and time perception play in shaping consumers’ decisions.

One study showed that under some circumstances a person’s desire to do something – perhaps take an exotic holiday – becomes stronger if they feel it is a long time since they last indulged.

Yet our research highlighted a previously ignored subtlety of marketing. Often great efforts have been taken to emphasize just how easy it is to do something, but the studies suggested that doing so could also backfire: when people perceive they are highly likely to indulge in something again they may feel more closely connected to these past events and are not so drawn to try them again in future.

Our studies also indicated that some form of vicious cycle may negatively affect the effectiveness of consumers who try to self-regulate their behavior – specifically those who choose to set their own rules or constraints. Such consumers may want to manage their finances, for example, by limiting the frequency and amount they spend on holidays, or deliberately buy fewer cigarettes each time they run out as part of efforts to stop smoking.

Such self-imposed limits could be effective, but our studies suggest that they may also backfire. As the constraints on consumers imply a reduced likelihood of the event – such as taking holidays or smoking cigarettes – in the future, people may feel the last time they indulged in the activity to be more distant, and therefore finding it more alluring. So the restrictions these people give themselves may actually make it easier for them to justify their indulgent behaviors – and encourage them to do it again.

The post How Our Perceived Future Influences Our Past first appeared on China Business Knowledge.