Chapter 9: Motivation and Goals

Goals play a critical role in everyday life and shape life and lifestyles. This chapter reviews and discusses the main approaches to the study of goals, addressing main theoretical endeavours that have emerged from psychological research, and emphasising the contributions from cognitive psychology to the topic. It also discusses literature on goals and motivation as found in tourism studies, highlighting the theoretical underpinnings used in this field. The discussion concludes with the need to update, in tourism studies, knowledge from cognitive psychology and propose how a better understanding of the cognitive foundations of goal-oriented behaviour can contribute to change tourism practice.