Why Feeling Real Beats Being Real: The Psychology of Village Tourism

Traditional villages have become one of the most compelling laboratories in tourism psychology, and a new study published in Current Psychology offers the most detailed map yet of what actually drives people to visit them. Chenyuan Mao, Wendong Chen, and Teng Yu surveyed 498 Chinese domestic tourists and applied structural equation modeling to untangle a deceptively simple question: when a visitor walks down a centuries-old stone lane, what psychological machinery converts that moment into a concrete intention to travel again? The answer, the researchers find, is not simply whether the village is genuinely old. It is whether the visitor becomes immersed, whether that immersion produces satisfaction, and whether the destination fits the visitor’s own sense of self.

The study’s theoretical backbone is Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory, a framework that treats experiences as sequences of shared, emotionally charged encounters that build momentum over time. Drawing on this theory, the authors constructed an integrated affect–cognition–behavior model in which immersive experience serves as the central bridge between what tourists perceive and what they intend to do. Authenticity, the study’s key input variable, is deliberately not treated as a single construct. Instead, the researchers operationalized four theoretically distinct dimensions: objective authenticity, which refers to the verifiable originality of objects and buildings; constructive authenticity, which concerns the meanings and narratives that tourists and destinations project onto places; existential authenticity, a state in which visitors feel more true to themselves through the encounter; and postmodern authenticity, the appreciation of simulations, performances, and playful re-creations that may have no original at all.

The empirical results are striking in their consistency. All four authenticity dimensions were significantly and positively associated with immersive experience, tourist satisfaction, and travel intention. In other words, whether a visitor cares about the provenance of a Ming dynasty courtyard, the story a guide tells about it, the feeling of escaping urban routine, or simply the enjoyable theatricality of a heritage performance, each perception feeds the same downstream pipeline. But the dimensions were not equal. Existential authenticity emerged as the strongest driver of immersion, suggesting that the sensation of becoming more fully oneself—feeling present, unburdened, and emotionally engaged—does more to pull a tourist into the experience than any measurable property of the physical site.

This finding carries real weight for the science of experience design. Immersion, in the sense popularized by Csikszentmihalyi’s flow research, describes a state in which attention narrows, self-consciousness fades, and the activity itself becomes absorbing. The study positions this state as a critical mediating mechanism: authenticity perceptions do not act on travel intention directly so much as they act through immersion. Once immersed, tourists reported significantly greater satisfaction, and immersion was also independently associated with stronger behavioral intention. Satisfaction, in turn, predicted travel intention directly, forming a second, parallel route from perception to action. The architecture of the model therefore resembles a dual-pathway system, with an affective route running through immersion and a more evaluative cognitive route running through satisfaction, both converging on the decision to travel.

Perhaps the most provocative results concern self-congruity, the degree to which a destination’s image matches a tourist’s own self-concept. The researchers hypothesized that self-congruity would act as a boundary condition, moderating the relationship between authenticity and travel intention, and the data confirmed this—but with a twist that complicates conventional wisdom. For existential authenticity, the moderating effect was positive: tourists who felt the village reflected who they are were especially responsive to the experience of personal authenticity, amplifying its effect on their intention to visit. For constructive and postmodern authenticity, however, the moderation was negative. When a destination’s curated narratives and staged performances aligned strongly with a visitor’s self-image, the independent effect of those authenticity dimensions on intention actually weakened, as if the self-congruity had absorbed or substituted for the authenticity signal.

Notably, objective authenticity showed no significant moderation at all. The verifiable age of a building or the documented originality of an artifact appears to influence travel intention regardless of whether the tourist sees the destination as an extension of themselves. This asymmetry is theoretically meaningful. It suggests that object-based authenticity operates on a relatively rational, evaluative channel that is insulated from identity processes, while the more constructed and performative forms of authenticity are entangled with how tourists define who they are. For a field that has debated the definition of authenticity for more than four decades, the finding provides rare empirical evidence that the different dimensions behave differently not just in magnitude but in kind.

The methodological approach deserves attention as well. The researchers collected survey data from Chinese domestic tourists visiting traditional villages, a context of particular urgency in China, where rapid urbanization has placed hundreds of historically significant settlements under pressure and where rural revitalization policy has made village tourism a centerpiece of cultural and economic strategy. Structural equation modeling, using the partial least squares approach, allowed the team to test the full network of relationships simultaneously, estimating direct effects, mediating pathways, and interaction terms within a single model. The sample size of 498 valid responses provides adequate statistical power for detecting the moderate effect sizes typical of psychological research on tourist behavior, and the measurement models were assessed against established criteria for reliability and discriminant validity.

The practical implications extend well beyond Chinese villages. Heritage managers and destination planners worldwide face a persistent dilemma: commercialization generates the revenue needed to preserve historic fabric, yet over-commercialization erodes the very qualities visitors come to experience. This study offers a more nuanced playbook. Because existential authenticity is the strongest driver of immersion, destinations should invest in experiences that let visitors participate rather than merely observe—craft workshops, homestays, festivals, and opportunities for genuine social interaction with residents. Because immersion and satisfaction form the mediating spine of the model, the quality of the on-site experience matters more than marketing claims of genuineness. And because self-congruity moderates several pathways, segmentation matters: tourists who see a village as an expression of their identity respond to different cues than those who evaluate it as external heritage.

The negative moderation effects also carry a warning for destination branding. If a village’s projected image becomes too tightly matched to a particular tourist identity, it may crowd out the independent contributions of constructed and postmodern authenticity, narrowing the destination’s appeal. A more open, less prescriptive brand identity could allow those dimensions to work on their own terms. Meanwhile, the null result for objective authenticity’s moderation suggests that conservation of authentic physical fabric remains a universally valuable investment, one that pays off across tourist types without depending on identity alignment.

As immersive technologies—from virtual reality reconstructions to gamified heritage trails—spread through the tourism industry, the study’s framework offers a template for evaluating them. The central insight is that the affective-cognitive bridge of immersion is where authenticity is converted into behavior, and that this conversion is conditioned by the tourist’s self-concept. A perfectly preserved village that fails to immerse will underperform a modestly staged one that succeeds, unless identity dynamics intervene. In the psychology of heritage travel, feeling real, it turns out, matters more than being real—and knowing who the visitor wants to be may matter most of all.

Subject of Research: Psychological pathways linking authenticity perceptions, immersive experience, satisfaction, and self-congruity to travel intention in traditional village tourism

Article Title: Back to the past: authenticity, immersive experience, satisfaction and self-congruity influencing travel intention in traditional villages

Article References: Mao, C., Chen, W., & Yu, T. (2026). Back to the past: authenticity, immersive experience, satisfaction and self-congruity influencing travel intention in traditional villages. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1604. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10163-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10163-z

Keywords: authenticity, immersive experience, tourist satisfaction, self-congruity, travel intention, traditional villages, heritage tourism, interaction ritual chain theory, structural equation modeling, cultural tourism, tourism psychology, rural revitalization