Religion has long been a primary motivation for journeys and it is considered the oldest non-economic reason for travelling. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons tourists choose to travel to sacred sites, with the specific aim of discovering relationships between personality traits and motivations for religious travel. Participating in the research were 679 Italian travellers to Medjugorje sanctuary, who completed the travel motivation scale and big five questionnaire. The results show that motivation is focused prevalently on the need for discovery in men and socialisation in women. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that personality traits are predictive of motivation factors differently for males and females.Keywords: religious tourism; motivations; personality traits; big five questionnaire Introduction Why people travel to sites of religious significance is an important question in studying tourism. The role of religion as a catalyst for increasing travel, the importance of collecting and disseminating best practices for encouraging it, as well as practical tools for improving the management and sustainability of religious destinations were highlighted in an international conference on 'Tourism, religions and dialogue of cultures ' (UNWTO, 2008).One type of religious travel is the pilgrimage. There are evident links between tourism and pilgrimage in terms of both the journey and the experience of community; indeed, Turner and Turner (1978) famously claimed that 'a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist ' (p. 20). According to the United Nation World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2008), nearly 300 million pilgrims visit religious sites every year all over the world, representing an expanding economic sector. For the tourism industry, pilgrims are generally treated like general tourists because pilgrims often have the same needs as general tourists and visit tourist-frequented places, such as museums, cafes, and shops, in addition to the religious sites. It can be stated that the pilgrimage is experiencing 'a marked resurgence ' (Digance, 2003) and is as popular now as it has been in the past.According to Shackley (2001), the pilgrim wishes to have a spiritual experience using travel as an act of fortification of faith. This can be accomplished through spiritual retirement in a sanctuary or through participation in some religious event such as mass or Tourism, 2013 Vol. 16, No. 5, 501 -506, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2012 Downloaded by [Costanza Scaffidi Abbate] at 06:03 06 July 2013 some other religious activity. Some people, probably, travel to maintain an identity, others to satisfy the feelings of nostalgia, some to experience the transcendent, and some to fulfill the requirements of particular faith-based groups, for example, the journey to Mecca for devout Muslims. Religious tourists, today, are considered 'pilgrims of modernity', choosing holy sites for reasons other than religious ones (MacCannell, 1976). Many different motivations, not of a relig...

The present field experiment examines the effect of self-awareness on adult perspective-taking and on prosocial behavior. University students at an Italian university were interviewed briefly on their campus, and for half of them self-awareness was induced by asking them to hold a mirror before their faces. In the same context they then had to choose between a postcard written in Italian and 1 written in English, to be sent to England. This led to a measure of perspective-taking, and their actual readiness to mail the postcard was taken as an index of prosocial or helping behavior. Both perspective-taking and helping behavior were boosted considerably by self-awareness.

Leadership is a group feature that directly impacts on team identification. Effective leaders are especially capable of fostering group cohesiveness and promoting efficacy in goal attainment. We assessed the relationship between transactional and transformational leadership style, team identification, and leader self-sacrifice. Participants were 186 call center employees who were headed by a leader who operated with either a transactional or a transformational leadership style. The employees reported their level of team identification and leader self-sacrifice. Results show how, in either the transactional or transformational leadership condition, levels of leadership and self-sacrifice were related to team identification, as well as the interaction effect between transactional leadership level and leader self-sacrifice. Our findings demonstrate how different leadership styles play a diverse role in this relationship.

Purpose Research on choice overload with adult participants has shown that the presence of a brand significantly mitigates the phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether these findings can be expanded to a population of adolescents, where it has already been shown that choice overload occurs in a similar way as adults. Design/methodology/approach Studies 1 and 2 aim to test whether the presence of a brand name mitigates the adverse consequences of choice overload in adolescents. In line with prior research on choice overload, in both studies, the authors compared between-subjects differences in the levels of reported dissatisfaction, difficulty and regret in a choice condition where adolescents chose among either 6 or 24 options associated with brand names and in another choice condition where adolescents chose among the same 6 or 24 options but not associated with brand names. Findings This paper presents evidence from two studies that when facing either a large or a small amount of choice options that are associated with brand names, choice overload disappears among adolescents. Conversely, when no brands are associated to the choice options, adolescents report choice overload, that is a greater dissatisfaction, difficulties and regret with larger (versus smaller) assortments. Practical implications Prior research on choice overload has led to recommendations that marketers and other choice architects should simply reduce choice options or assortments to improve consumers’ satisfaction. However, our finding suggests that this recommendation may be invalidated when brands are present, at least for certain age groups. Adolescents cope indeed very well with large assortments of branded products. Originality/value The research adds to the existing understanding of choice overload, demonstrating that the brand is a moderator of the phenomenon for adolescents, who currently represent a large portion of the market. A second important contribution of this work is that it extends prior research on choice overload to real-world consumer scenarios, where consumers choose among products with a brand, rather than among products described only by technical characteristics or nutritional values, as in classical studies on choice overload.

This study investigated the influence of priming and bystander apathy on helping behavior. After priming prosociality through a scrambled sentences test, participants encountered a woman who dropped the books she was carrying. Helping behavior in bystander and no-bystander conditions was tested. The results showed that people in a prosocial-prime condition were more likely to help than people in a neutral-prime condition, and that the effect of priming persists even in the presence of bystanders.