Enhancing service research through evolutionary psychology: studies in service design, tourism, and hospitality
Creators: name: Noerfelt, Astrid Warncke
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330312
subject: Service design
classificationCode: 350608
subject: Marketing theory
classificationCode: 350611
subject: Service marketing
classificationCode: 350806
subject: Tourist behaviour and visitor experience

description: While our environment has changed drastically over the millennia, today’s customers’ decision-making and behaviors are influenced by the same psychological mechanisms that drove our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The field of evolutionary psychology has provided increasing evidence of such links to the past and has highlighted the importance of understanding deep-rooted evolved motives, i.e., the motivational systems that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, because these motives affect human cognition, affect, and behavior. Such insights are relevant to service research and practice due to their focus on understanding customer behaviors to enable meaningful experiences. However, the application of evolutionary psychology to service contexts remains relatively sparse and limits service fields to more immediate (i.e., proximate) accounts of customer experiences. Based on the above observations, this thesis aims to advance service research by answering the research question: How may a multileveled approach to evolutionary psychology enhance service research? 

In answering the above research question, the thesis views service research as a broad and diverse research area which encompasses subdomains such as service design, tourism, and hospitality that all focus on understanding service customer needs and behaviors and enabling positive experiences. More specifically, the thesis follows a paper-based structure and includes three papers that each provide a standalone contribution to the service subdomains of respectively service design, tourism, and hospitality, yet together form a coherent contribution to service research. The thesis is also connected through a focus on service customers’ engagement in painful activities and the effects of sex ratio on behaviors. Such topics are investigated through a multilevel framework which highlights that individual characteristics such as traits and gender (here: micro level), situational factors such as cues in the service environment (here: meso level), and societal factors such as sex ratio (here: macro level) influence the activation of service customers’ evolved motives to have a fuller account of relevant motive-activating conditions.

To answer the research question, Research paper 1 takes a conceptual approach and argues that eight evolved motives influence the customer experience in ways that are relevant to service design. It further highlights that service designers should understand how these motives interact with micro, meso, and macro environmental factors, with situational cues being particularly salient because they are more directly within the control of service designers. As such, the paper contributes to the service design literature by demonstrating the usefulness of an evolutionary lens and has implications for service design practitioners in illustrating how a framework of evolved motives can be used as an important tool.  

In the context of the thesis, Research paper 1 constitutes an introduction to evolutionary thinking in service research and is followed by Research paper 2 which provides an in-depth investigation of a particular micro level trait: service customers’ tendency to engage in painful activities. Specifically, Research paper 2 follows a mixed methods approach of qualitative interview analysis and quantitative questionnaire data analysis to provide an updated conceptualization and operationalization of benign masochism as rooted in the evolutionary notion of “play.” A major contribution of this paper to tourism research and practice is thus the development of a new scale which can be used to explain important behaviors and potentially to segment tourists. Indeed, the paper finds that benign masochism is associated with a higher intention to engage in three tourism activities involving pain and notes the relevance of investigating how macro environmental factors influence such preferences. 

In line with the latter suggestion, Research paper 3 examines the effects of sex ratio on male and female service customers’ attitudes and behaviors, including their willingness to engage in a painful and challenging tourism activity. This is based on the assumption that a skewed sex ratio can activate evolved mating motives leading to sex-specific reactions. Through an online experiment, the hypothesized relationships are tested and rejected. However, the paper still makes an important contribution to the tourism and hospitality literature by investigating potential effects of sex ratio and discussing potential reasons for the null findings. 

Collectively, the thesis contributes to service research and practice by demonstrating the utility of a multilevel approach to evolutionary psychology. Indeed, throughout the thesis’ six chapters, conceptual arguments and empirical findings highlight that both individual characteristics, situational factors, and societal factors influence the activation of service customers’ evolved motives with important implications for customer experiences and behaviors. As such, the thesis has implications for service research and practice and invites future research on intriguing topics.