Factors Driving Environmentally Responsible Behaviors by Tourists:A Case Study of Taiwan, China

Domestic research on environmentally responsible behavior lags behind that of other countries, wherein much stands on public or students' angles concerning daily environmental behaviors. Deficiencies also exist concerning driving mechanisms relating to environmentally responsible behaviors in the context of tourism. This paper integrates environmental behavior theory and tourist psychology theory to construct a conceptual model of tourists' environmentally responsible behaviors. Then, a case study approach was adopted to further clarify complex psychological mechanisms regarding environmental cognition, attitude, affection, and intent that drive such environmentally responsible behaviors. The results show that environmental knowledge, environmental attitude, nature- based tourism motivation, environmental behavior intention, scenic spots' environmental quality, and scenic spots' environmental policy are six important driving factors underlying tourists' environmentally responsible behaviors. Environmental attitude and environmental behavior intention play important intermediary roles in this model. They regulate the internal relationships between other driving factors and tourists' environmentally responsible behaviors. The paper confirms the rationality of a linear model of attitude, intent, and responsible behavior concerning the environment. Environmental attitude plays a weakly positive role in environmentally responsible behavior, and responses to it by having a substantially positive effect on environmental behavior intention. Underlying this substantially positive effect of environmental attitude, nature- based tourism motivation can have a direct effect on environmentally responsible behaviors and causes an indirect effect through environmental behavior intention. In contrast, although environmental knowledge has no direct effect on such behavior and other driving factors, it is considered to have an indirect influence on them by positively affecting environmental attitude. There are no correlations among scenic spots' environment quality, scenic spots' environmental policy, and environmental behavior intention, and the first two factors have only a weakly positive effect on environmentally responsible behaviors. Our model's independent variables can explain the 26.9% variance in environmental attitude, 31.8%variance in environmental behavior intention, and 77.5% variance in environmentally responsible behavior. The entire model proved effective, and demonstrated that individual and situational driving factors influence tourists' environmentally responsible behaviors Individual driving factors include environmental knowledge, environmental attitude, nature-based tourism motivation, and environmental behavior intention. Situational driving factors include scenic spots' environment quality and scenic spots' environmental policy. The mechanism of driving factors concerning environmentally responsible behaviors can be divided into the individual and situational factors of two sequential, progressive,interdependent, and interlinked processes. Individual factor processes exist with interconnected relationships and play a formative role in the formation mechanism behind tourists' environmentally responsible behaviors with a greater degree of both direct and indirect effects, wherever situational factor processes are relatively simple and have only been found to play a supporting role with relatively smaller degree of direct effects.