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This paper examines tourists' experiences related to guest-host interactions and their role in the development of tourists' psychological ownership to mitigate the attitude-behavior gaps in sustainable cultural tourism. Although previous studies have acknowledged the antecedents of psychological ownership and their potential to mitigate such gaps, the process of developing these antecedents and mechanisms through which they foster psychological ownership remain unclear. In the context of cultural tourism, guest-host interactions with locals is the key expectation and experience among tourists. Studying whether and how guest-host interactions contribute to psychological ownership development is meaningful for cultural tourism providers to design products or services for better tourist experiences and sustainable tourism behaviors. Based on a field study, including in-depth interviews and observations, our findings revealed that activities, such as trip consultation, knowledge sharing, and special event engagement can foster increased knowledge, perceived control, self-investment, and self-congruity among tourists. We argue that during the process of behavioral change toward tourism sustainability, tourism experiences generated by guest-host interactions facilitate psychological ownership development, thereby removing barriers to sustainable behaviors by mitigating tourists' attitude-behavior gap.
Chen et al. (Fri,) studied this question.