Virtual reality and museum tourism in the anchoring paradigm

The present research designed a series of two studies and examined the impacts of the additional VR tour on museum tourist behaviour, learning and satisfaction, considering tourists’ belief of technology in the anchoring paradigm. It finds that museum tourists with an additional VR tour of cultural exhibitions spend less time and show a targeted temporal–spatial pattern in the on-site visit than those without VR. The findings indicated that participants who read the poster about VR are advanced and helpful in museum visits and reported higher learning and satisfaction compared with those who did not read the poster, no matter whether they took the additional VR tour or not. This finding suggests that external anchors significantly influence and even bias people’s judgements in visitor learning and satisfaction with their visit to cultural exhibitions. This study is among the first to look into the human-technology relationship, particularly the sentiment of ‘technological optimism’ in the tourism context. Using the anchoring theory, this study investigates museum tourists’ cognitive mechanism involving their belief in technology. It is also innovative in employing interdisciplinary methods, such as spatial-temporal analysis, in-depth interviews, observations and experiments.