Sustainable Tourist Behavior Based On The Theory Of Planned Behavior And Environmental Ethics

With the rapid expansion of tourism,the interaction between human beings and the natural environment is becoming more and more frequent.The uncivilized behaviors in tourism activities even cause irreversible damage to the resources and environment of vacation destination and seriously threaten the sustainable development of tourism industry.As the guiding ideology of regulating human behavior,environmental ethics greatly affect the implementation of tourists' sustainable tourism behavior.Studying the relationship between environmental ethics and sustainable tourist behavior has both theoretical and practical significance for advancing ecotourism and sustainable tourism development.However,few studies have examined the sustainable tourist behavior from the perspective of environmental ethics.The mechanism of affecting people's environmental ethics is not yet clear,controversies in the academic community about the conceptual measurement and operationalization of sustainable tourist behavior exist and the path of environmental ethics to sustainable tourist behavior is unclear.Based on systematically combing the domestic and international researches on environmental ethics and tourist behavior,this article firstly clarifies the concept of environmental ethics and the definition and measurement of sustainable tourist behavior,and then extends the theory of planned behavior and constructs a conceptual model of sustainable tourist behavior,including environmental value,environmental knowledge,environmental beliefs,environmental morality,environmental attachments,subjective norm,perceived behavior control and behavioral intention as the structural variables.With SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 23.0 statistical software,this paper analyzes the interaction between various elements of environmental ethics and then explores drive mechanism of sustainable tourist behavior,by using exploratory factor analysis,structural equation modeling and other analytical methods.The findings are as follows:(1)Tourists' environmental ethics includes five aspects: environmental values,environmental knowledge,environmental morality,environmental attachments and environmental beliefs.There exist complex functional relationships among the five constituent elements: There is no significant correlation between environmental values and environmental morality,environmental beliefs and environmental attachments.However,the environmental values positively influence the tourists' environmental knowledge,environmental attachments and environmental beliefs;the environmental knowledge positively influences tourists' environmental morality,environmental attachments and environmental beliefs,and environmental attachments positively affect tourist's environmental morality.Among them,the impact of environmental values on environmental knowledge is greater than the influence on environmental attachments and environmental beliefs.Environmental knowledge has a slightly higher impact on environmental beliefs than environmental morality and attachments;(2)The article modifies the theory of planned behavior by bringing environmental attachments ? morality and beliefs into “environmental attitudes” and increasing environmental values and environmental knowledge.The behavioral intention has a positive and significant impact on tourists' sustainable behavior.The environmental values,environmental morality,environmental knowledge,environmental beliefs,environmental attachments,subjective norm and perceived behavioral control positively and significantly influence tourists' behavioral intention,and indirectly affect sustainable tourist behavior.Among them,the effect of perceived behavioral control on behavioral intention is stronger.Environmental knowledge and behavioral intentions play an important intermediary role in the relationship between environmental ethics and sustainable tourist behavior;(3)Whether the tourists' behavior is sustainable or not can be measured from choice of tourism transportation,choice of accommodation,choice of tourism products and services.Finally,the article puts forward suggestions and countermeasures to improve the performance of tourists' behavior from the aspects of popularization of ecological values,education of environmental knowledge,enhancement of environmental attachments,control of environmental morality,guidance of environmental beliefs,construction of social atmosphere,and upgrading of tourism consumption structure.