Identity … is not a material thing to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated.
—Erving Goffman, 19591
Frances is a woman in her late 50s of Japanese American descent. She has worked for years as a bookkeeper and office manager for a trucking company. The following is an excerpt of a telephone interview.
Frances’s interview is quite interesting as it reveals many layers of complexity about her, her experience at the museum, and her motivations for visiting. Although it would appear that Frances has some basic knowledge about plants and gardening, visiting the Berkeley Botanical Gardens appears to primarily satisfy other, very personal needs for her, particularly what she referred to as her spiritual side. Her self-perception as spiritual appeared to directly contribute to her motivations for visiting the museum; by extrapolation, she perceived that a museum would be a good place to “enact” this personal attribute. She is a person seeking calm and tranquility; museums, particularly botanical gardens, are places with lots of opportunities to find a quiet place away from the crowds. The additional insight into her sense of self revealed how the Botanical Gardens helped her through a very rough part in her life. As a result, she became very attached to the Gardens, almost in a physical sense, and thus seeks it out on a regular basis. Frances appeared to be motivated by some deeply held needs. Given that she returns frequently to this same institution, we are probably safe in assuming that she finds these experiences quite satisfying.
Frances is an example of the category of visitor who uses museums to enact the role of Rechargers. A surprisingly large number of individuals actively seek out museums and other leisure settings in order to engage in what museum and tourism researchers Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne have described as “restoration” experiences.2 These are individuals, who like Frances, seek respite from the everyday stresses and harsh realities of the world. Unlike other visitors, the Recharger’s motivation for visiting a museum is primarily not framed in terms of the content of exhibitions (as in the example of Maria in the previous chapter), or even in terms of fun and enjoyment. Although these visitors may discover things that they enjoy, the Recharger is seeking what psychologist Steve Kaplan calls “re-creation”3—it may be a human-made, magnificent architectural space; a natural, breath-taking view; or just the solitude of a quiet corner.
Frances’s description of her Botanical Gardens visit provides a fascinating lens through which to better understand the nature of the museum visitor experience. In these long-term interviews, particularly in those like Frances’s where an effort was made to inquire deeply into the visitor’s reasons for the visit and the satisfactions derived, what stands out is how profoundly personal and strongly tied to each individual’s sense of identity are these museum visits. Also striking is how consistently an individual’s post-visit narrative relates to his or her entering narrative. In other words, prior to entering the Gardens, Frances would have talked about how this visit was all about her desire to find peace and quiet as “going there helps me unwind.” Days later, this was still not only a salient motivation for her, but also the dominant framework through which she made sense of her experience.
Frances’s visitor experience emerges as something deeply rooted in her sense of self. This interview is typical of the stories each of the hundreds of individuals my colleagues and I have interviewed about their museum visitor experiences over the past years. These stories reveal how complex, as well as personal, are each individual’s leisure-time museum experiences. As Frances’s interview clearly shows, each of these unique stories reveal how the museum was used to support some aspect of each individual’s personal identity-related needs and desires.
WHAT IS IDENTITY?
What do I mean when I use the term identity? Identity is something all of us intuitively understand at some level; it speaks to how others think about us, the “me,” as well as how we think about ourselves, the “I.” This distinction was recognized more than two hundred years ago by the philosopher Immanuel Kant,4 but most clearly explained a hundred years later by pioneering psychologist William James. In 1890, James wrote about the self as being both the known self (me) and the self as knower (I).5 Even though his definition of identity/self is now more than a hundred years old (and is reflective of the values of his time), it remains one of the most cogent and useful definitions ever created:
In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.6
According to James, what determines the boundary between self and not-self is one’s emotional attitude about an object or thought. The things, people, or thoughts with which one identifies, are quite literally part of self, so long as what happens to them is experienced as something happening to one’s own self. This capacity to identify experiences as ones’ own allows each of us to create a story from personal memories, with ourselves as the leading character; a story that extends both back and forward in time. In the years since James, the constructs of “self” and “identity” have been used by a wide range of social science investigators from a variety of disciplines, each modifying James’s original definition. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no single agreed-upon definition of either self or identity, though there are a number of useful reviews of these various perspectives.7 Highlighting the complexities of the topic, psychologists Jerome Bruner and Bernie Kalmar write: “Self is both outer and inner, public and private, innate and acquired, the product of evolution and the offspring of culturally shaped narrative.”8 Perhaps more pointedly, social psychologist Bernd Simon states that
even if identity turns out to be an ‘analytical fiction,’ it will prove to be a highly useful analytical fiction in the search for a better understanding of human experiences and behaviors. If used as a shorthand expression or placeholder for social and psychological processes revolving around self-definition or self-interpretation, including the variable but systematic instantiations thereof, the notion of identity will serve the function of a powerful conceptual tool.9
It is just the conceptual tool we are seeking as we try to understand the nature of the confluence of museums and visitors.
The deeper one delves into the literature on identity, the more muddled becomes the construct; trying to wrap one’s arms around identity in a way that makes it a usable research and conceptual tool is a challenging task. For the purpose at hand, I chose to build upon the work of a number of gifted investigators. Like Uri Bronfenbrenner, Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Jr., Debra Skinner, Carole Cain, and Bernd Simon, I subscribe to the view that identity is the combination of both internal and external social forces—both cultural and individual agencies contribute to identity.10 Like James Gee, Stuart Hall, Etione Wenger, and Kath Woodward, I appreciate that there are layers of separate identities—individual, social, and societal.11,12 Like Jerome Bruner, Bernie Kalmar, and Ulrich Neisser, I acknowledge the important evolutionary influence on identity of innate and learned perceptions about the physical environment.13 Identity derives from both genetic and learned influences.14 Combining these perspectives, identity emerges as something that is malleable and continually constructed by the individual as need requires. Thus, our identity can be defined as something that is always “situated” in the immediate realities of the physical and socio-cultural world. Our identity is a reflection and reaction to both the social and physical world we consciously perceive in the moment, but identity is also influenced by the vast unconscious set of family, cultural, and personal history influences each of us carries within us. Each is continuously constructing and maintaining, not one, but numerous identities which are expressed collectively or individually at different times, depending upon need and circumstance.15 From this perspective, identity is emergent, rather than permanent; it is something nimble, ever-changing, and adaptive. This view of identity runs quite parallel to emerging understandings of the brain and learning. As I will discuss more fully in Chapter 6, knowledge and memory are also emergent rather than permanent aspects of mind.16
Contrary to what was traditionally thought, humans do not possess just one single, omnibus, permanent identity, but each of us work from a malleable set of ever-changing identities designed to fit particular situations, needs, and opportunities. That’s not to say that we don’t all possess and act upon a few strongly-wired, deeply-held identities such as our gender, nationality and for many people, religious and racial/ethnic identities. I have called these more deeply-held identities the “big ‘I’ identities” and they form the majority of what most social scientists have focused on over the years. The social science literature is replete with investigations of these kinds of big ‘I’ identities, and perhaps not surprisingly, they often are described by the same demographic qualities of individuals discussed at the beginning of this book. Clearly, there are people who possess these types of identities and behaviors and are motivated by such big ‘I’ identities. However, I would assert that for most people, these identities represent a small part of what drives their everyday thoughts and activities. Most people don’t get up in the morning and decide whether or not to brush their teeth based upon their racial/ethnic identity. Most people don’t decide whether or not to take a vacation based upon their national or gender identity. And most people don’t choose which kind of leisure activity to partake in based upon their religious identity. Although we can certainly imagine situations where nationality, gender, religion, and race/ethnicity could directly influence someone’s leisure decisions, including the decision to visit a museum, most people do not view their leisure experiences, including museum-going, through the lens of these types of ‘I’ identities.
The type of identity that does figure prominently into the myriad everyday decisions in our lives, including leisure, are what I have called “little ‘i’ identities”—identities that respond to the needs and realities of the specific moment and situation. This kind of identity can be thought of as truly “situated” identities. Although these kinds of identities are often just as important to our sense of self as our big ‘I’ identities, they have received less attention by social scientists. Little ‘i’ identities include our sense of being a member of a family and the responsibilities that involves. For example, we may not spend a lot of time thinking of ourselves as a good niece or nephew, but when our calendar, Blackberry, or memory reminds us of our Aunt’s birthday, we send her a card, and in the process enact our identity as a “good relative.”
As we’ve already seen in the previous chapters, some of us think of ourselves as curious explorers while others like Frances think of themselves as spiritual. These are not identities we normally have a chance to play out during a typical workday or evening at home, but they are identities we eagerly try to enact during leisure time. I am willing to wager that if one of Frances’s colleagues had asked her to select several adjectives that best described how she thought of herself, “spiritual” would probably not have been one of the adjectives chosen. In the context of work, “spiritual” wasn’t likely to be an identity that made sense to Frances. However, if one of her friends had asked her the same question, I suspect that “spiritual” may have emerged as one of the ways Frances identified herself. These kinds of little ‘i’ identities are quite contextual but still important and often as, or even more fundamental to one’s sense of self as are big ‘I’ identities.
What is important to appreciate is that everyone has identity needs that are very important to them but which are only expressed in the appropriate time and context. For example, we all know men and women who are “super dads” and “super moms” who seem to devote every waking moment to their children’s needs and desires. But for every super parent, we probably know many more moms and dads who clearly love their children but do not consider their children to be their single highest life priority. “Parent” is an important identity for both kinds of mom and dad, but for the former it is more of a big ‘I’ identity and for the latter, more of a little ‘i’ identity. Similarly, we all know men and women whose race/ethnicity is a constant reality and issue in their lives—a part of their daily identity. But we also know others of the same race/ethnicity for whom this identity is of secondary importance at best; it is considered a happenstance of birth, no more. One very public example of this point was made by former tennis star Martina Navratilova when she objected to the press’s preoccupation with her sexual preference as a lesbian by stating, “But I am also a daughter, a sister, dog lover, a good skier, interested in art, literature and music, a vegetarian and so on.”17 This is why demographics do such a poor job of segmenting individuals; as stated earlier this form of categorization is both too general and too divorced from specific realities to be predictive. To really understand people and their actions, we need to understand the characteristics and motivations that matter in a particular time, place, and circumstance, otherwise we create stereotypes and cartoon versions of reality. This is the reason identity has appealed to so many social scientists for so long. Identity is a construct that has the potential to be a richly predictive variable since it is so specific and central to how actual people actually live their lives.
IDENTITY AND BEHAVIOR
Of course, I have made a huge leap in all of the above discussions by jumping from the idea that people have different kinds of identities to the idea that those identities influence behaviors. Most readers of this book easily took this leap with me, but in case you didn’t, what follows is a brief overview of some of the extensive literature that documents this phenomenon.
The idea that identity in humans represents a causative agent in motivation and behavior begins from the premise that we are self-aware, self-motivating organisms. Whether we are truly unique in this regard in the animal kingdom is an issue of great debate, but few would argue with the fact people normally think of themselves as the originator of their own thoughts and actions. Stated another way, we perceive ourselves as directly controlling and directing what we do.18 The scholarly term for this is self-regulation, which according to psychologists involves goal setting, cognitive preparations for behaving, and on-going monitoring of behaviors.19 The setting of goals are fundamental to self-regulation and, again according to psychologists, goals are derived from perceptions of what one could/should be and how one could/should act, or for that matter what one is afraid to be.20 Another way of talking about this is what social psychologist Albert Bandura calls “self-efficacy.” According to Bandura, “self-efficacy is the belief in ones’ capabilities to execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.”21 Over the course of a nearly 50-year career, Bandura has investigated how sense of self directly impacts people’s motivations and behaviors. The bottom line, according to Bandura, is that it does!22
Starting from the premise that our sense of self influences our actions, it’s not a big leap to ask the question—how does this sense of self influence our motivations and behavior? Leaping into this breach, many psychologists have tried to codify how this process works. Identity Theory describes a causal and hierarchical connection between an individual’s perception of their relationship to a specific social relationship called commitment, self-perception, identity, and role performance in that social situation which make up their behaviors.23 This model assumes that social interactions are fundamental to all human life, which seems a reasonable assumption, and that identity is a major, if not primary, vehicle for navigating those social situations. This theory also posits that each individual maintains multiple identities which are reflective of the different roles, positions, and responsibilities he or she encounters in life.
In summary, the theory concludes that identities are assumed to motivate behaviors. The resulting behaviors provide feedback which then can reaffirm that the individual is the kind of person defined by those identities. In particular, the theory postulates that the more salient an identity is to an individual, the more sensitive that individual should be to opportunities that allow him or her to enact behaviors that confirm that identity and the stronger his or her motivations would be to actually perform such behaviors.24 Following up on these ideas, other researchers have pointed out that people should not only be acting out behaviors based upon their perceived identities, but they should be actively paying attention to their own actions in order to actually learn, by virtue of their behaviors, who they are.25 In essence, this research suggests that we act who we are so we can be how we act!
NAILING JELL-O TO THE WALL
All of what has proceeded in this chapter is fundamental to the task of using of identity as a meaningful research construct for understanding the museum visitor experience. We have now more clearly defined what we mean by identity and we have seen that in study after study, identity, whether called self-worth, self-knowledge, or self-efficacy is an important factor in determining motivation and behavior. Still, we have not fully “operationalized” identity in a way that is really useful to our needs of binding together the worlds of museums and visitors. To further that goal we need to be able to use identity for something beyond just a nice device for telling stories, even compelling ones. What we need is the ability to use identity as a tool for gauging how and in what specific ways leisure decisions are made, which in our specific case, means decisions related to visiting a museum. As we described in the previous chapter, the public perceives museums as places that permit (afford) a range of possible leisure experiences. The question then is, in what ways do people’s leisure time needs match up with their perceptions of a museum’s affordances? I’m proposing that identity represents the key to understanding how these two disparate entities come together; identity is the “vehicle” by which perceptions of personal needs and motivations can be matched with perceptions of institutional capacities and affordances. But, as I have also suggested, identity has historically proven to be a challenging and often slippery concept to investigate; it is extremely difficult to “see” identity, let alone measure it.
The work of German social psychologist Bernd Simon provides one way to solve this problem. Simon describes an approach that allows one to characterize identity in ways that are both observable and measurable.26 The key to Simon’s approach is developing identity as a “mediating variable” rather than as just a vague, descriptive tool that makes sense only in narrative form. Simon operationalizes identity so that it can be used as a causative agent—a variable that possesses real substance and scientific validity and reliability. Like the research summarized above, Simon begins with the assumption that “through self-interpretation, people achieve an understanding of themselves or, in other words, an identity, which in turn influences their subsequent perception and behavior.”27 Quite literally, as situations arise, people address those situations by consciously, and to a degree unconsciously, responding on the basis of how they think about themselves. Simon’s thinking is very similar to Albert Bandura’s ideas of self-efficacy and Sheldon Stryker’s Identity Theory. However, it is at this point that Simon’s approach diverges; he argues that these self-interpretations involve a varying number of what he refers to as tangible and measurable “self-aspects.”
Simon did not invent the concept of self-aspects; that distinction goes to the American psychologist Patty Linville who twenty years ago hypothesized that self-concept needed to be viewed as a multi-faceted cognitive construct composed of concrete and distinguishable entities she called self-aspects.28 She defined self-aspects as the individualized and idiosyncratic roles, relationships, contexts, or activities that individuals use to describe themselves. But unlike most earlier investigators, Linville’s descriptions of identity were not couched in ethereal and convoluted philosophical terms, but in the framework of modern neuroscience. She argued that to the extent these identity-related self-descriptions are real, each self-aspect should be encoded within the brain. Self-aspects should be mental representations maintained in memory; each embedded within related neural networks. Specifically, each self-aspect was likely a unique neural node interconnected with associated networks of neurons. Each neuronal network would be made up of related cognitive, affective, and evaluative memories, as well as other similar self-aspect neural nodes. Linville went on to theorize that the strength of associations among these various self-aspect nodes should vary, with some self-representations being very important to the person and thus, highly interconnected with other nodes and some less important and only weakly interconnected.29 Linville’s conceptualization of identity in this way permitted Simon and other researchers to practically think about and measure identity-related influences. Although Linville is a social psychologist, her self-aspect construct allows researchers to operationalize a range of different identity-related concepts, including identities that are social as well as asocial, those that occur at the level of the individual or the level of the society, and both ‘I’ types of identity and ‘i’ types of identity. Whenever an individual conceptualizes a relationship between themselves and some other entity, then in theory that relationship is encoded in the brain as a self-aspect, and in theory it is amenable to study.
It is this last point that is so critical as Linville’s construct of self-aspects provides a way to concretely describe an individual’s internal cognitive categorization or conceptualization of self. Reframing identity in this way provides a tangible mechanism for understanding how an individual self-describes himself or herself. Thus, we can use an individual’s self-aspects as a tool for understanding how an individual thinks about who they are and thus, why and how they might act. According to Simon, self-aspects can refer to
generalized psychological characteristics or traits (e.g., introverted), physical features (e.g., red hair), roles (e.g., father), abilities (e.g., bilingual), tastes (e.g., preference for French red wines), attitudes (e.g., against the death penalty), behaviors (e.g., I work a lot) and explicit group or category membership (e.g., member of the Communist party).30
Individuals make sense of their actions and roles by ascribing identity-related qualities or descriptions to themselves within a specific situation. Some self-aspects can be generalized across a wide range of situations, such as “I’m a clever person” or “I’m a people-person,” but many others are quite narrow and only relate to very particular circumstances, such as “I’m good at spelling” or “I’m a good Polka dancer.”
In our example at the beginning of this chapter, Frances appeared to have a set of self-aspects to describe herself with respect to her visit to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. She indicated that the reason she had visited the Gardens repeatedly, as well as the reason she visited the previous week, was because she finds the setting therapeutic: “So therapeutic, that it sort of became like medicine to me … All I have to do is walk in the front gate and I can feel my blood pressure dropping.” Frances was using the self-aspect of someone seeking “therapy” to clarify what her needs and motivations were on that day. Frances also used the self-aspect of “spiritual” to describe herself, and by extension saw the Gardens as a place that allowed her to enact her spiritual self.
Was Frances unique or do most people walk around with identity-needs in their heads that describe why they do things? Investigations by Simon31 and other researchers have actually found that people like Frances are anything but unique; these kinds of self-definitional roles and rationalizations appear to be quite common.32 Individuals regularly construct identity-related descriptions of themselves, descriptions that are specific to the event or situation they are about to engage in. Not only do people have these descriptions, or self-aspects, in their heads, they actually serve as working models for the person, telling him or her what to expect and how to behave in particular types of situations. For example, in cases of anorexia nervosa, self-images of being fat can drive someone to starve themselves, even though others would judge them as already well beyond a state of thinness. And in a stunning example of the importance of identity-related self-definitions on motivations and behavior, psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have shown that individuals who self-define themselves as persistent learners consistently achieve better in school than individuals who self-defined themselves as smart; both types of self-aspect were independent of how intelligent the individuals actually were.33 Those who thought of themselves as persistent learners were able to overcome short-term failures, and as self-described, persevere through to success. Self-defined smart individuals were often afraid of failure, and thus failed in the face of adversity. Ideas of self do influence our motivations and our behaviors, frequently in profound and even predictable ways.
Here’s how I envision most people deciding whether or not to visit a museum. Over the course of a week, or day, or maybe even on the spur of the moment, an individual begins to decide how they are going to spend a chunk of upcoming leisure time. As always, there will be many needs competing for that time; there are work tasks and household chores, social obligations, health and fitness needs, and, of course, personal satisfaction goals. Simultaneously, a range of possible leisure options begin to surface in the person’s mind: “I heard there’s a sale at the mall and I could go shopping for those shoes I need,” “I’m overdue getting together with Fred,” “I should spend more time with the children,” “Susan told me there’s an interesting new exhibition at the museum,” and so on. The decision of what to do then emerges through a conscious process of first prioritizing the various identity-related needs the individual has, then matching these needs against the list of possible leisure options conjured up by the person. What makes this task possible for the individual is that his or her leisure identity-related needs are made concrete through the conscious awareness of self-aspects; each self-aspect is associated with one or more identity-related need. Similarly, each of the leisure options is evaluated on the basis of whether or not it supports the self-aspects the person is trying to satisfy. The solution, a leisure choice, is arrived at when the individual’s most pressing self-aspects match well with the affordances of a convenient and financially affordable leisure setting. In the case of a decision to visit a museum, the match could be between a desire to satisfy one’s intellectual curiosity and a setting that affords unique and intellectually stimulating new things to see and do; or it could be a match between a desire to be a good parent and a setting that affords family-friendly, safe, and educationally enriching activities for children; or it could be a match between an overwhelming need to escape, even briefly, the “rat race” with the prospect of being able to visit a peaceful, secluded setting with good benches and lovely views.
I believe that this is the process that happens many times every year as people contemplate whether or not to visit a museum. Although this description makes it sound cognitive and systematic, it is almost certainly much more haphazard much of the time. Still, some variation on this process must be going on in our brains every time we have to make a leisure experience decision. Depending upon an individual’s identity-related needs and interests at that particular day and time, the individual sifts through all the possible leisure options he or she can think of that will enable him or her to achieve those needs. If a museum provides a good fit, then a museum visit is what is chosen; if not, the museum visit is filed away as an option for another day. As described in the previous chapter, the vast majority of visitors to museums already possess a working model of what they believe museums are generally like, and thus, what any particular museum “affords” in the way of leisure opportunities. Museums are places that can be fun, educational, family-friendly, quiet, and exciting; or in Frances’s case, museums are places that allow you to connect with your “inner spirit.” Based upon the self-aspects the individual hopes to enact during this particular leisure experience—“I’m looking for something fun to do,” “I feel a desire to express my curiosity today,” “I really need to step up to the parent role this weekend,” “I’m feeling really stressed,” “I could really use some peace and solitude,” or “I’m feeling adventuresome,” etc.—he or she searches memory for the perfect match of a setting to fit that need. If a museum fits the bill, then he or she will choose to visit. Thus, even before the visitor steps across the threshold of the museum, he or she has already consciously or for many visitors semi-consciously created a set of expectations for the visit. These expectations represent an amalgam of his or her identity-related leisure desires and needs and his or her socially and culturally constructed view of what the museum affords.
By and large, the vast majority of museum visitors’ personal, identity-driven perceptions of their roles and needs are well-matched with the actual realities of the museum. When this happens, visit satisfaction is almost guaranteed. Occasionally a visitor’s expectations do not match the reality he or she encounters, and they leave dissatisfied. Amazingly, these cases are relatively rare which bespeaks the high understanding that today’s visitors have about the museums they visit. However, what’s most striking about this system is that visitors to museums and other comparable leisure settings use these kinds of identity-related self-aspects to not only aid in deciding which place to actually visit, they also use them to make sense of their visit while they are engaged. Hence, a visitor’s identity-related visit motivations represent not just the reasons for visiting the museum, they also represent the predominant vehicle for experiencing the museum. And perhaps most striking is that these same entering identity-related visit motivations, as made apparent by visitos’ self-aspects, also frame the ways in which visitors make sense of their museum expe rience after they leave. Visitors use their self-aspects as a framework for reflecting back on the experience and “remembering” what it was like. There is a caveat, though.
Much of the previous discussion assumes that a visitor’s identity-related motivations, as evidenced by their self-aspects, are consciously available to them; they can be thought about and articulated. This is, for our purposes at least, unfortunately not always the case. Recent research on the mind is revealing that most of our memories and even “thoughts” occur below the level of awareness. According to most estimates, more than 90% of thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind, without our awareness.34 Similarly, most of the ways we formulate thoughts are non-verbal rather than verbal. Verbal language is part of how we store, process, and represent what’s going on in our minds but despite its great importance, it is not necessarily the best device for communicating our inner feelings and needs.35 By necessity, my emphasis here on conscious and verbally describable self-aspects needs to be appreciated as representing just the proverbial tip of the iceberg with regard to what’s going on in the heads of visitors. I am inclined to believe that although only some visitors are like Frances, highly verbal and “meta-cognitive” (i.e., capable of reflecting on and talking about what they’re thinking), all visitors share these deep-seated identity-related motivations and all are capable, some only with prompting, of describing the self-aspects that underlie their visit. As my colleagues and I have discovered, you can’t just walk up to someone and ask “Why did you go to the museum today?” and expect to get at their identity-related motivations. To access the kind of deeply-considered responses required to elicit a person’s self-aspects involves asking the question in the right way. And for some visitors, it requires some probing before they are able to be sufficiently self-reflective to give a good answer. Psychologists have referred to this as the “laddering” procedures—the in-depth procedures for interviewing and analysis designed to uncover the relationship and connections between what someone does and why.36
EVIDENCE FOR IDENTITY-RELATED MOTIVATIONS
These ideas represent a neat theory that describes how to reconceptualize the relationship between visitors and museums, but until a few years ago this was just a theory. Then, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation and in collaboration with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, my colleagues and I initiated a series of research studies designed to test the validity of this theory.37
The first task was to try to develop a way to measure each of these five identity-related categories in order to allow visitors to simply and easily tell us what was going on inside their heads. In a series of iterative tests with several thousand visitors at ten different zoos and aquariums across the U.S., my colleagues Joe Heimlich, Kerry Bronnenkant, Nettie Witgert and I set about creating a research tool that we felt would validly and reliably capture the identity-related motivations of zoo and aquarium visitors.38 Over 125 different phrases were generated representing different ways people had or could express their identity-related motivations for visiting a zoo or aquarium. These items and a variety of formats were initially piloted and then tested using traditional methods and statistical techniques of instrument development. At the end of this process, the list had been whittled down to 20 statements which were once again refined and retested for reliability and construct validity. The final instrument listed 20 statements representing four examples from each of the five key identity-related motivations; each statement was designed to match the realities of a zoo and/or aquarium visit. The instrument was designed so that each visitor would be asked to select the five statements that best explained why they chose to visit the zoo or aquarium on that particular day. For each of the five statements selected, they then would be asked to rank them in importance on a seven-point Likert-type scale, with 1 being not very important and 7 being extremely important.
With this tool in hand, the next step was to rigorously test the theory that visitors could be meaningfully categorized as a function of their identity-related motivations. Not only was it actually possible to differentiate visitors in this way, but it was actually useful. Data for this phase of the research was collected at four institutions: one large zoo (Philadelphia Zoo) and one small zoo (Salisbury [Maryland] Zoo), one large aquarium (National Aquarium in Baltimore) and one small aquarium (New York Aquarium). These institutions were selected to be as broadly representative of the zoo and aquarium community as possible. (Of course, given that we were collecting data from just four institutions meant that “representative” was a relative concept.) A random sample of adults across all four sites (N = 1,555) completed pre- and post-visit instruments. Sub-samples of these visitors participated in additional aspects of the study. Data was collected during the summer months for all sites except the National Aquarium. Unfortunately, major construction projects over the summer of 2005 delayed data collection at the National Aquarium until fall of that year.
The identity-related motivational assessment was administered pre-visit only and required roughly two to three minutes for visitors to complete. Several different variants of the instrument were created in order to randomly shuffle the order of the 20 items to avoid order biases. In addition, data sets were collected that measured changes in the visitors’ knowledge of conservation and their attitudes towards conservation and the role zoos and aquariums play in supporting conservation. A series of one-on-one interviews to determine where (in the zoo and aquarium) visitors went and why was administered to a subset of visitors, and finally, a separate subset of visitors received follow-up telephone interviews or an email online survey to understand long-term memories and determine the impact of the experience on visitors.
Overall, slightly more than half (55%) of all visitors were shown to possess a clear dominant identity-related visit motivation upon entering the zoo or aquarium. An additional 7% of visitors had a dual-dominant motivation, indicating strong motivations in two areas simultaneously. Therefore, more than three out of every five visitors (62%) possessed a strong identity-related visit motivation as they entered the zoo or aquarium. All five of the identity-related motivational categories were represented at all four sites. The relative frequencies of visitors entering with different dominant motivations varied across sites, with each site having a distinctive profile. The number of individuals displaying a dominant entry visit motivation varied from just under half (47%) at the National Aquarium to more than two-thirds of visitors (68%) at the New York Aquarium. Most importantly though, was the strong relationship that existed between an individual visitor’s identity-related visit motivations and what they learned at the zoo or aquarium.
As an initial way to determine if visitors’ entering identity-related motivations influenced zoo/aquarium outcomes, we conducted a two-step cluster analysis using data from the matched pre-post population. Cluster analysis is an exploratory data analysis tool using a variety of algorithms designed to sort objects or responses into groups; the degree of association between two objects is maximal if they belong to the same group and minimal otherwise. First, a cluster analysis was performed on visitors’ cognitive and affective (post-only) responses. The distributions of visitors’ post-experience understanding of conservation and attitudes towards conservation fell into six unique clusters. Next, a second cluster analysis was conducted to determine what (if any) relationship existed between those individuals who expressed a dominant preference for one of the five identity-related visit motivations and the individuals falling within each of the six naturally forming “understanding and affect” clusters. The results revealed a striking correlation between visitors’ exiting understanding of conservation and attitudes toward conservation and zoos/aquariums and their entering identity-related visit motivations. Individuals who expressed a single dominant identity-related motivation ended up clustering with others with similar motivations; this was true for each of the five motivational groups. As a consequence, five of the distinct knowledge/attitude understanding clusters were made up almost exclusively (80–100%) of individuals with a single entering visit motivation. The remaining cluster was presumably a blend of individuals with dual and/or no strong entering identity-related motivations. This stunning result indicates that something is going on here! The patterns in cognitive and affective understanding that resulted from a zoo/aquarium visit seemed to be directly related to the entering identity-related visit motivation of visitors. Specifically, the experiences of the roughly half of visitors who entered the zoo or aquarium possessing a single, dominant motivation were, as judged by cognitive and affective outcomes, most like the other visitors with the same entering motivation.
Overall analysis of the pre- and post-measures of cognitive and affective learning indicated that zoo and aquarium visitors showed no significant gains in their understanding of conservation, but significant gains in their attitudes towards conservation and the role that zoos and aquariums play in promoting conservation. However, when visitors were grouped by their identity-related motivations, this “one-size-fits-all” analysis was revealed to be somewhat misleading. At least among those visitors who had a single dominant entering motivation, one specific subset of visitors did show significant gains in their cognition, while most did not. Likewise, some visitors changed their affect as a function of their zoo or aquarium visit, while other groups did not. As with knowledge change, using the overall affect score yielded a distorted picture of what happened. Based upon these analyses, three sub-groupings of visitors emerged as particularly interesting. Although in this study, only a relatively small percentage of total zoo/aquarium visitors (7%) came primarily in order to experience the specialness of the setting (i.e., Experience seekers), they were the only definable group of visitors who demonstrated significant gains in both cognitive and affective learning. By contrast, 20% of visitors, those classified by our measures as coming to enact an Explorer or Recharger identity-related motivation showed no significant cognitive or affective gains.
Perhaps the strongest indication of the value of segmenting visitors according to their entering identity-related motivations was revealed by the qualitative interview data collected immediately following the visit and seven to eleven months post-visit. Both sets of data showed a relationship between entering motivations and exiting meaning-making. Although no two interviews were exactly alike, visitors within each motivational category provided interview responses reflective of category-typical identity-related motivations and used their own self-aspects as verbal aids in discussing their memories and learning. As the museum visit experience model predicts and these visitors’ recollections confirmed, visitors utilized self-aspects to help shape both their entering identity-related reasons for visiting, as well as a way to help organize their experience and communicate it to themselves and others.
For example, the self-aspect “I’m an animal lover” was reinforced by visiting a location devoted to displaying animals and communicating that animals are interesting and important. The same self-aspect was also reinforced by being in a social context where other people were also admiring and enjoying animals. Similarly, the self-aspect “I’m a good parent” was reinforced by bringing one’s child to an educationally oriented setting where the child enjoyed him- or herself and appeared to be “learning.” It was also reinforced by seeing other families in the same setting, and doing things that looked to be good parenting behavior.
Not surprisingly then, those individuals who entered the zoo/aquarium with well-formed self-aspects—self-aspects that were meta-cognitively accessible to them as visit motivations—by and large used their self-aspects as a framework for experiencing the social and physical context of the zoo or aquarium. They also used these self-aspects as a cognitive framework for subsequently making meaning of their experience. Explorers related to what they saw and found interesting (and acted out this “me”-centered agenda regardless of whether they were with children or not). Facilitators were focused on what their significant others saw and found interesting (and they, too, acted out this agenda by, for example, allowing their children to direct the visit). Experience seekers reflected on the gestalt of the day, particularly how enjoyable the visit was. Professional/Hobbyists tended to enter with very specific, content-oriented interests and used the zoo/aquarium as a vehicle for facilitating those interests (for instance, photography, or setting up a saltwater aquarium). Finally, Rechargers, like Experience seekers, were more focused on the gestalt of the day. But Rechargers were not so much interested in having fun as they were in having a peaceful or inspiring experience. Also evident among these zoo/aquarium-situated identities were clustering of self-aspects; for example, among Explorers, an interest in animals and a self-perception as someone who is curious and likes to look closely at things; among Facilitators, a desire to be a good parent and placing a high value on learning. Self-aspects emerged as truly contextually constructed products. They appeared to be complex representations of the visitor’s self embedded within the particular social and physical context of the situation, in this case, a zoo or aquarium.
The data also revealed that visitors within each of these five identity-related motivational groupings were truly different. For example, although Explorers and Professional/Hobbyists seemed to be similar with regard to their “me”-focused visit, in other dimensions they diverged markedly. Similarly Facilitators, Experience seekers, and Rechargers converged in some areas and diverged in others. These differences were revealed in how the setting was used, in changes in cognition and affect, and in the ways different clusters of visitors talked about their experiences.
The most important generalization was that a large number of visitors arrived at the zoo/aquarium with the expectation that the setting would afford certain things to them. Next, they sought out experiences that reinforced those expectations, and encoded their experiences as having satisfied those same expectations. For a majority of the visitors investigated in this study, their entering identity-related motivations revealed some measure of predictability about what that visitor’s museum experience would generally be like. Each visitor’s museum experience was of course unique, but each was framed within the bounds of the socially or culturally defined limits of how a zoo or aquarium visit affords exploration, facilitation, experience-seeking, professional and hobby support, and recharging. Other types of experiences were no doubt possible, but they appeared to be relatively infrequently sought out or enacted by these particular visitors.
Since this research was completed, similar data has been collected at a large eastern U.S. botanical garden, at two living history museums, one in the eastern U.S. and the other in the midwestern U.S., at a west coast U.S. science center, aquarium and whale watching excursion,39 and at a variety of other categories of museums, including a major eastern Canadian art museum and an art museum and science center in Colombia.40 Although the ways in which the motivations were expressed varied across settings, the basic categories held, as did the importance of these categories for helping to understand visitors’ meaning making. An important finding was that in the off-season, the percentage of visitors entering with a single dominant motivation in some settings increased to close to 100%.41 Meanwhile, I too have continued to collect data from individuals, as well as continued to work on strategies for improving the validity and reliability of data collection strategies. My data now includes individuals visiting a wide range of museum types, including art museums, history museums, natural history museums, zoos, science centers, national parks, botanical gardens, aquariums, flight museums, history museums, and children’s museums. All of the data I have collected to date are consistent with the basic findings of the zoo and aquarium study cited above.
As illustrated by the interview with Frances at the beginning of this chapter, like most visitors, she did not arrive at the botanical garden as a blank slate. Typical of a frequent visitor, Frances visits the Berkeley Botanical Gardens with very explicit expectations of what she will see and do there; she already knows that it is a good place to visit. But even Frances’s first visit to the Gardens involved pre-formed expectations, in her case influenced partially by the recommendation of her friend and of course, also informed by her own prior experiences and knowledge of such places. From the beginning she was hoping to find quiet and tranquility and some measure of respite from the stresses of her life; initially, these related to her health and her social situation, these days it appears to be primarily related to her job. She came with expectations of what she hoped to get out of her visit, and since her expectations were compatible with what the setting afforded, she achieved exactly what she hoped for. Her satisfaction was directly tied to both her image of the setting and her expectations for her visit. “I probably wasn’t actually there for more than about fifteen or twenty minutes, but it was
enough to do the job … To rejuvenate me, making me feel less stressed, more calm. To allow me to connect with my inner spirit…. I came to be refreshed, and I was.” Frances had a pre-defined purpose for visiting the botanical garden and then she used the garden as a vehicle for fulfilling that purpose. This can be diagrammed as below:
identity-related needs + perceived museum affordances —> visit expectations —> in-museum visit experiences —> satisfaction and memories —> identity-related needs + perceived museum affordances —> visit expectations —> and so on
Recent research is beginning to show this type of positive feedback system between leisure expectations, activities, satisfactions, and setting image occurs in a variety of leisure situations.42 And I have come to believe it is very much the norm for most people who visit museums.
The most surprising and, I suspect controversial, part of this model is that so much of what appears to be vital to an understanding of the museum visitor experience is represented by events that happen long before the individual ever sets foot inside an actual museum. Much of the action is not taking place inside the museum; it’s happening at the level of an individual’s identity-related leisure needs and interests and his or her generic perceptions of the value of museums. That’s not to say the “in-museum” part of the above model is unimportant, but that it is remarkably less important than we have historically expected, or wanted to believe. Less important, though, is not the same as unimportant! So before we start fretting too much, let’s turn our attention to that most familiar part of the museum visitor experience, the part that takes place within the museum.