Abstract
Wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) can permit interactions between humans and wildlife that are detrimental to the animals' welfare and species conservation. Social media portraying human-wildlife interactions could affect people's perceptions of their acceptability and desirability or stimulate demand for detrimental practices. To date, there is no evidence that viewing human-wildlife interactions on social media is linked to emotional responses or a desire to actually engage in such activities in real life. We created an experimental, international, online survey to assess how responses to social media representations of WTAs correlate with the desire to attend them. We presented respondents from 6 countries with 6 types of WTA under 4 experimental treatments. The treatments comprised different formats describing the WTA: plain text, plain text + photograph, short video clip, and long video clip. For each combination of WTA and treatment, we asked how likely respondents would be to visit the WTA and assessed their emotional response to the animals featured. Among our 2427 respondents, social media format did not consistently influence respondents' desire to attend a venue or their emotional responses. Positive emotional responses and desire to attend a given WTA, however, were strongly correlated, and both varied with respondents' countries. Respondents from the United States were most likely to attend, followed by Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Positive emotional responses of respondents from each country mirrored this order. Younger respondents and those who used a greater number of social media platforms were more likely to attend each WTA than older respondents with less engagement with social media. Responses to our survey differed by respondents' country, and high social media usage, especially among younger users, may normalize the types of human-wildlife interactions being viewed and prevent those users from engaging critically with social media content.