Some Hypotheses on the Psychology of Travel

The primary subject of examination is what might be called pure travel, i.e., travel for pleasure, sight-seeing and experience for its own sake, rather than travel for some particular concrete motive such as an individual business trip or the movement of a hungry tribe to a new food-producing location. What lies behind this remarkable activity of man, whereby he locomotes vast geographical distances, foresaking his own haunts and country, suspending powerful emotional ties with his family and associates to wander in unknown places? It is perhaps banal to point out that pure travel motives set into motion untold numbers of people each year, and that huge industries have developed to serve these needs.

In performing a motivational analysis it would be unwise to ignore the possibility that there exist basic curiosity or exploratory drives. These seem to appear spontaneously, without training, in many animals, and there is reason to believe that man, too, has some complement of this basic drive (6). It should be noted, however, that the purely exploratory activities of lower animals are usually quite circumscribed, unlike the globe-spanning movements of human travelers. There is a difference between the desire of a Philadelphian to know his section of the city and his desire to visit Rome. A postulated exploratory drive would account more readily for narrow exploration of an orientational nature in the vicinity of one's usual surroundings than for longer-range travel. In any case, while there may well be components of such a drive in much of travel, it is clear that we must seek other motives.

One might note at the outset that the very concept of travel is in our society a glamorous value-laden one, so that often the stereotype of a place arouses far more pleasure as an anticipatory response than the actual place itself. Candid travelers will sometimes admit that to say: “Next week I shall be in Cairo” involves a degree of gratification never reached in Cairo itself. The