Responses to sports tourist misbehavior: the influence of psychological distance, informal social control and personal implication-behavioral and EEG evidence.

Authors

Yina Zhang, Jianlan Ding, Li Zhang, Haonan Shi, Yihang Huang, Zixuan Cheng, Wei Liu

Published in

Frontiers in psychology. Volume 17. Pages 1789417. Epub Jul 13, 2026.

Abstract

With the rapid growth of sports tourism participation, the governance of tourist misbehavior has become a key issue in destination management. Based on Construal Level Theory (CLT), this study explores the behavioral and neural mechanisms through which psychological distance influences misbehavior intention.
Guided by the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework, this study constructed a moderated mediation model in which informal social control was introduced as a key mediator and personal implication as a moderator. The proposed model was tested through two online behavioral experiments and one electroencephalogram (EEG) experiment.
The two behavioral experiments showed that sports tourists exhibited higher misbehavior intention in non-local (vs. local) contexts, and this effect was partially mediated by informal social control. Moreover, personal implication exerted a moderated mediation effect, such that the indirect effect of psychological distance on misbehavior intention through informal social control was stronger in low personal implication contexts (environmental misbehavior) than in high personal implication contexts (public order misbehavior). The EEG experiment revealed that, during the early subconscious processing stage, local (vs. non-local) contexts elicited greater cognitive control (larger N200 amplitudes) for public order misbehavior but reduced cognitive control (smaller N200 amplitudes) for environmental misbehavior. During the later conscious processing stage, local (vs. non-local) contexts elicited greater attentional resource allocation (larger P300 amplitudes) for public order misbehavior. In addition, a significant negative correlation was observed between misbehavior intention and N200 amplitudes, indicating that heightened cognitive control inhibits misbehavior intention.
This study examines how psychological distance influences tourist misbehavior in sports tourism. Drawing on CLT, results show that non-local contexts increase misbehavior intention by weakening informal social control through an abstract mindset, whereas local contexts strengthen cognitive control and normative sensitivity, thereby reducing misbehavior. Informal social control serves as a key mediating mechanism, while personal implication moderates this relationship, indicating boundary conditions across different misbehavior types. Behavioral and ERP evidence jointly demonstrate that local contexts enhance cognitive control, reflected in stronger N200 responses, which suppress misbehavior intention. In contrast, non-local contexts reduce early conflict monitoring. These findings provide multi-level evidence linking psychological, and neural mechanisms in misbehavior decision-making, and provide practical guidance for destinations to curb tourists' misbehavior.

PMID:
42516185
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 28 Jul 2026.

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