it’s the beauty of the location. The top reasons people are inspired
to travel? Some 58 percent say they needed a break from their
everyday life, 55 percent wanted to visit a friend or family member,
38 percent because of a life event, like a birthday party, anniversary
or a wedding.^25
Let’s say you have a week off, and you can plan a vacation to
anywhere you’d like to go. Where would YOU go? What would you
do? Some people visit the same location year after year. Others
might like to go to a city or a place they’ve never been. If you are
in a place that’s new, would you rather go on an organized tour and
see the sights? Or wander around and explore all on your own?
It should come as no surprise that sensation-seeking might
be able to predict what you might enjoy. It also should be no
surprise that high sensation-seekers tend to prefer travel experi-
ences that immerse them in a culture and experiences.
Remember the White Rabbit?
“It makes me feel alive,” she explained. “It makes me feel
like I’m actually using my brain. I’m actually thinking about, ‘Okay,
so this kind of situation, how am I feeling about that? What are the
options of the things that can happen, and working with that?’ It’s
amazing. It’s an amazing thing to do.”
For many people, when they feel fear, that’s a signal to them
that they shouldn’t do something. For the White Rabbit it is the
opposite. She thinks, “I should do it.”
“Fear is something that I basically never have except when
it comes to height. People ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid, like to go
travel?’ I’m like, ‘No. No.’”
My idea of a vacation is to find a pretty place and sit there,
but high sensation-seekers would cringe at the idea of a do-nothing
holiday.
In 1995, Helen Gilchrist and her colleagues at the Resource
and Service Development Centre in Leeds, compared the sensation-
seeking scores of a group of UK citizens who recently returned from
an adventure holiday in Africa to a control group of a similar age
and income. Their results won’t surprise you. Highly significant
differences were found between the adventure travelers and every-
day people, with the adventure travelers having much higher
scores in sensation-seeking, particularly the thrill- and adventure-
seeking scale.^26
This is certainly the case for Anne, a 43-year-old woman who
recently packed up for an extended trip. “I was at a concert and56 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:13, subject to the Cambridge