What does not satisfy when we find it was not the thing we were desiring.
—C.S. Lewis, 19331
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Shawn, a 26-year-old white male as he exited the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
Q: |
So, tell me about your visit to the Natural History Museum. Did you have a good time? |
A: |
Yes, it was great. My girlfriend and I got see all the things we were hoping to see. |
Q: |
That’s great. What were you hoping to see? |
A: |
Oh, you know, the usual. We wanted to see the Hope Diamond, the dinosaurs, all the usual stuff. |
Q: |
So these things, the Hope Diamond and the dinosaurs, were these things you knew about before you visited? Or were they things you found out about once you got here? |
A: |
Oh, definitely knew about before we got here. We’d read the guides and we’ve been planning this trip to DC for months. All our friends were giving us advice on what to see and do; this museum was a must-see. We needed to see the Hope Diamond, the dinosaurs, we also need to see the big flag and Wizard of Oz stuff over at the History Museum and all the air and space stuff like the space capsule and moon rock over at the Air and Space Museum. |
Q: |
Wow, that’s a lot to see! Anything else? |
Sure, we also saw the Capitol yesterday and a couple of the monuments, and tomorrow we’ve got tickets for the White House. We’re only here for a few days [chuckles] but we’re going to cram as much as we can into the visit as possible. |
|
Q: |
Great, so tell me more about this visit to the Natural History Museum. How long have you been here? What did you see first? |
A: |
We spent about an hour or so here. We were just overwhelmed, there’s so much to see; it’s really mind-blowing…. We went first to see the Hope Diamond because [girlfriend] really wanted to see that more than anything. It took us some time to find it, but we went straight there. It was really beautiful. Of course, so were all the other gems there. The whole experience up there just knocked your socks off. While we were up there we wandered a little more around the geology exhibits. Huge meteorites, man! I never knew that so much stuff from outer space hits the Earth every day; it’s like several hundred every day. |
Q: |
Wow, I didn’t know that! Okay, and then, what did you do? |
A: |
Well, after the gems and geology stuff we made our way down to the dinosaurs. That was really cool, too. I’ve always loved dinosaurs and it was so neat to see all the dinosaur skeletons and dioramas and stuff. |
[Later in the interview] |
|
Q: |
So, how would you rate your overall visit, from a 1, not satisfied at all to a 7, totally satisfied? |
A: |
Oh, definitely a 7, yeah, definitely a 7. This was really great. We got to see what we came to see here, we had a blast, and it’s only our second day in DC. We’re really stoked now to see the rest of DC! |
Shawn is a wonderful example of a visitor with an Experience seeker visit motivation. Not only was he a tourist in Washington, DC, he was a man on a mission! He and his girlfriend had been planning this visit for months, and between the guides and his friends the two of them had accumulated a visitor’s “shopping list” of sights to see and experiences to collect. High on his list were the Smithsonian museums and he was happily ticking them off. He came primarily to see the Hope Diamond and dinosaurs and that’s what he did. He actually got more in the bargain than he anticipated, finding out about geology as well as about paleontology. (For the sake of brevity, I eliminated much of that part of the interview, but Shawn talked for quite a while about all the things he saw and remembered, many of which were tied to his childhood interest in dinosaurs.) He rated his experience a big “7” out of a possible 7 on the scale of satisfaction. And why shouldn’t he have?
Shawn had a specific entering identity-related set of needs related to his role as a once-in-a-lifetime visitor to the nation’s capital. He was determined to see the important landmarks of Washington, DC—places and things he had long heard and dreamed about, and now he was living that dream. The Natural History Museum played an important role in those dreams and the designers of the Museum did not disappoint Shawn. Although way-finding was a small challenge, given that the Hope Diamond is on the top floor of the Museum and some distance from the entrance, Shawn and his girlfriend were undeterred in their search. Fortunately, the designers of the Geology, Gems, and Minerals exhibit made it relatively easy to locate the Hope Diamond once the visitor is in the exhibit area. The design of the dinosaur exhibits also was conducive to this “fast-track” approach. Shawn not only saw and spent time at these iconic exhibits, but for all the reasons outlined in the previous chapter, he spent time at several other exhibits and picked up a variety of personally relevant and interesting facts about geology and paleontology. The sum total of this package of museum experiences was highly enjoyable and fulfilling. In short, Shawn entered the Natural History Museum with a well-defined set of expectations, framed around a “tourist” self-aspect. He hoped to see two of the nation’s iconic exhibits that are housed at the Natural History Museum—the Hope Diamond and dinosaurs, and experience the Natural History Museum. In other words, he wanted to be able to say that “he had been there, done that”! Clearly, Shawn exited the Museum feeling fully satisfied that he had accomplished those goals.
Shawn’s high rating of the Natural History Museum is not an anomaly as museums rank as highly-satisfying leisure venues. Thousands of customer satisfaction surveys have been done in museums of all kinds and sizes, and almost without exception, the results are consistently high. Is this because museums are great places? In part, this is true, but the more likely answer is that most people who visit museums already possess some reasonable understanding of what museums afford in the way of leisure benefits. High ratings are the result of a strong match between the entering identity-related visit motivations of visitors and the realities of the actual museum visit they experience.
RESEARCH ON LEISURE SATISFACTION
Most of us have a good sense of what it means to be satisfied. Satisfaction is the neuro-physiological experience of feeling content and at ease with one’s situation. Satisfaction is also commonly used as a measure to judge how well an organization’s products and services meet or surpass customer’s expectations. In a competitive marketplace where many organizations compete for a share of the public’s time and money, customer satisfaction is often viewed as a key differentiator because it is a strong predictor of whether people will continue to utilize an organization’s products and services. Not surprisingly, many museums have become quite diligent at trying to measure visitor satisfaction. The fact that visitor satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept, and that the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service, has not prevented institutions from measuring it. Accordingly, the state of a person’s satisfaction with any given product or service depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables. Two leading consumer psychologists, Leonard Berry and A. Parasuraman, defined no less than ten dimensions of satisfaction: Quality, Value, Timeliness, Efficiency, Ease of Access, Environment, Inter-departmental Teamwork, Frontline Service Behaviors, Commitment to the Customer, and Innovation.2 At some level, this research can be applied to the museum visitor experience, but most of the models have been designed for customer purchases of products from for-profit companies.
More directly relevant to our concerns has been the research that has been conducted specifically on the topic of leisure satisfaction using what is called the dynamic model of the leisure experience.3 Leisure researchers have defined the dynamic leisure experience as a balance between a participant’s entering expectations for a leisure experience and the set of interactions that the leisure participant has during a leisure experience, including all the social and physical context interactions in which he or she participates. This is a model quite similar to the one I have been laying out in this book. Since most leisure researchers are quantitatively minded, they tend to couch their models in those terms. Thus, according to the leisure research literature, a leisure participant’s overall experience can be conceived as the sum of the experiences that occur during the leisure, with each episode having the potential to confirm or disconfirm the individual’s entering expectations. What are these episodes? According to leisure researchers, they include both situational factors such as the presence of litter or crowds, as well as subjective factors such as the perception that things were easy to find, the extent to which goals were met, or the perceived quality of what was seen. Although most leisure researchers, as well as most leisure purveyors (including museum professionals), tend to be overly concerned with situational factors since these are the things they perceive they can control—litter can be picked up and crowds can be managed—they are not necessarily the factors most important to visitors. As leisure researchers Alan Graefe and Anthony Fedler and Steven Whisman and Steven Hollenhorst discovered, leisure satisfaction was most strongly influenced by people’s subjective evaluations of the elements of a recreational trip and only indirectly influenced by the situational aspects of the activity.4 In other words, perceptions of the experience were far more important than were actual conditions.
These ideas were followed up in-depth by leisure researchers Bongkoo Lee, Scott Shafer, and Inho Kang and they confirmed that perceptions were more important than situations. Although all the various episodes and interactions that occurred during a leisure situation were involved to a greater or lesser extent in the algorithm of a visitor’s ratings of satisfaction, the most important consideration was how visitors saw themselves within the situation. In particular, visitors’ ratings of satisfaction were most strongly associated with the degree to which their self-identity and identity-related needs were satisfied. And these, of course, turned out to be directly related to their entering expectations and motivations for the visit.5 Quoting from Lee, Shafer, and Kang:
In conclusion, leisure participants have several expectations or goals when they participate in a leisure activity. Maintaining affective meanings associated with their self-identities (i.e., fundamental sentiments) is one of the expectations or goals. However the expectation may be confirmed at one time during leisure participation, but disconfirmed at a different time depending on episodes (i.e., social interactions between a leisure participant and others). The confirmation/disconfirmation of affective meanings associated with self-identity produces outcomes (i.e., emotions), and, in turn, lead to evaluations on episodes. Evaluations made of episodes determine leisure participants’ satisfaction levels (p. 106).
Visit satisfaction was primarily determined by whether or not visitors perceived that their entering identity-related motivations were satisfied. These results have now been confirmed by other studies as well.6 They are also confirmed by the example of Shawn presented above, as well as for all of the other museum visitors we’ve met so far in this book—George, Elmira, Maria, Frances, Mara, Sara, and Hanna. And so it is for most people who visit museums.
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES
One other important result emerges from this leisure and tourism research on satisfaction—not only do most people’s satisfactions derive from their entering expectations, but these expectations are frequently manipulated by visitors to ensure that they fit. Spanish tourism researchers Ignacio Rodriguez del Bosque and Hector San Martin found that tourists consistently tended to adjust their perceptions to their beliefs in order to minimize cognitive dissonance.7 The theory of cognitive dissonance holds that inconsistency among beliefs or behaviors will cause an uncomfortable psychological tension. Frequently, this perceived psychological tension leads people to change their beliefs to fit their actual behaviors, but the opposite can also happen.8 The research of del Bosque and San Martin seems to suggest that in the case of leisure and tourism, people routinely place high importance on achieving satisfaction of their expectations. Thus, even when occasionally something in their experience does not quite match up with their expectations, as for example Shawn’s comments about the challenges of finding the Hope Diamond or the behavior of Hanna’s son while visiting the High Desert Museum, visitors tend to excuse away these experiences as insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Much of this comes under the topic of self-fulfilling prophesies.
Visitor’s identity-related motivations turn out to be classic examples of self-fulfilling prophesies—a situation where a prediction of what’s to happen becomes true because of the influence our expectations have on seeing what we want to see. First proposed more than fifty years ago by the sociologist Robert Merton,9 the effects and impact of self-fulfilling prophecies have been documented across a large number of contexts and situations, ranging from teacher effects on student learning, to selling decisions in real estate, to research scientists reporting of results, and to the impact of mothers on children’s underage drinking behaviors.10 The reason self-fulfilling prophecies occur is because personal expectations are subjective; therefore, the influence of expectations undermines building an objective knowledge base. A self-fulfilling prophecy is simply a cause-and-effect scenario that has been repeatedly proven true—“in the past, I’ve gone to places like this and this happened so there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again. And if it doesn’t quite turn out that way, it was probably some quirky event that I can ignore since it was supposed to turn out that way.” And so it is for most visitors, most of the time.
WHEN EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERIENCES CLASH
Although satisfaction is the norm, that is not always the case. Felipe is a Latino male in his late 30s who is a social services worker involved with his community, particularly his church. In February 2001, he was one of the individuals we observed visiting the California Science Center. Felipe was visiting the Science Center as part of a large, multi-generational group comprised of at least seven people. These included his two children, his wife, a friend of one of his children, and another family member of this friend. We observed continuous social interaction between and among the group members throughout the visit. Felipe talked to the children, to his wife, and to the others in the group. Over the course of the visit, Felipe was very directive of his children’s experiences in particular and constantly telling them what they should look at and what exhibits not to attend to, though they did not always follow his advice. The following excerpt comes from an interview conducted at a local library twenty months later. We categorized Felipe as having a Facilitator motivation during his visit because, as you’ll see, Felipe makes it clear that his goal for his visit was to affect a specific learning agenda he had devised for his children.
Felipe makes it clear that he was at the Science Center only for his children and not primarily to have a good time as a family, but to support his children’s learning. He wanted them to learn specific science content in order to change their behaviors—get more exercise. Felipe was willing to acknowledge that other people might have other motivations for visiting the Science Center, but the only reason for him to go with his children was for them to Learn. [Note: I purposefully use a capital “L” here to emphasize the traditional, narrow definition of the word “learning.”] Given that he was unsure of how much they learned, he was only partially satisfied with the experience. In particular, Felipe felt that the design of the Science Center interfered with the learning; it had too many exhibits and not enough focus, particularly on environmental issues. Why Felipe felt that this latter topic was so important for his children was not made explicit in the interview. At the end, he indicated that while he still hoped that the visit was in some way valuable to his children’s learning, he believed their time could have been better spent, for example, in learning more about religion.
The Sunday school comment points to a certain perspective on learning in out-of-school settings that Felipe brought to the Science Center. He did not expect his children to learn science as an abstract body of knowledge, but rather as a set of facts with specific outcomes, for example, exercise leads to better health and appreciation of the environment yields an increased appreciation for God’s creation. At some level, Felipe seemed to view the Science Center visit as analogous to Sunday school—both help his children make better moral choices. Although being a good parent and doing something about his children’s “chubbiness” is clearly important to him, this does not appear to be the manner in which Felipe defines himself. His passion is Christianity which he expresses through his church work. He possesses an ‘i’ identity to be a good parent; he should help to educate his children. Taking his children to the Science Center was an expression of that identity-related motivation. However, he ended up questioning his decision since he was uncertain if his children achieved the desired learning that his parental motivation dictated they should. Presumably, if his children had demonstrated evidence of the desired changes in knowledge and behavior, he might have felt otherwise. Under the circumstance, it seems unlikely that he will take his children back to the Science Center any time soon, despite the fact that admission is free.
Unlike the other museum visitors we’ve profiled in the previous chapters, Felipe did not possess a well-honed mental concept of what the Science Center could best offer his children. His prior experiences and understanding of places like the Science Center led him to have a slightly inaccurate model of this experience. The Science Center was an educational institution, but the kinds of learning experiences it supported “looked” and “felt” very different from those Felipe envisioned for his children. His model of learning was more in line with the formality of schooling. The Sunday school classes at his church fit his model, but the more free-wheeling, free-choice nature of the Science Center did not. Felipe’s perceptions of the “actual” Science Center experience did not align with his perceptions of the “imagined” Science Center experience. Although he acknowledged that his children probably learned something, and he was aware of the fact that his children seemed to be enjoying themselves, these observations were not consistent with his self-aspect of a “good parent.” It is important to note that Felipe’s self-identity construct as a good parent was not changed by his museum visitor experience. Two years later, he still could not reconcile the reality of his museum visit experience, in particular the lack of learning he perceived his children experienced, with his expectations for visiting the Museum. The result was dissatisfaction with the overall experience and the likelihood that Felipe will not soon be taking his family to visit another museum.
Felipe was unlike most other museum visitors in the sense that he found the museum visit experience less than totally satisfying. I’ve tried to suggest that this was primarily because Felipe possessed a deficient understanding of what the Science Center experience offered, relative to his expectations. Not included in the interview excerpts with Felipe was a whole line of questioning about his prior museum experience. He had virtually none, which might explain his difficulties with the exhibits at California Science Center. But his difficulties also point out the issues surrounding the broadening of museum audiences. As I will discuss more fully in Chapter 9 of this book, this model provides important insights as to how to attract new and historically under-represented individuals to museums, but it also suggests what the challenges are. In Felipe’s case, we can infer that his misperceptions about what the museum visitor experience should offer were, in part, due to a lack of relevant experience and, in part, cultural. Even if he had a deep knowledge of what learning was like at a place like the California Science Center, Felipe may have opted to invest his leisure time elsewhere because of his culturally informed beliefs of what it means to be a good parent and what “learning” should be like. What was marred by his Science Center experience was not Felipe’s self-concept of himself as a good parent, but his concept of what museums offer and how they can be utilized to satisfy important identity-related needs.