The influence of caring, curiosity, and knowledge on visitors' conservation intentions: an exploratory investigation at the Tracy Aviary

Rapid development and population growth challenges society to adopt behaviors that help conserve vital environmental resources. Zoos play an important role in this challenge because they receive millions of visitors annually and have opportunities to influence visitors' willingness to conserve important resources. Previous research in visitor outcomes has shown that after a zoo visit, people express intentions to engage in conservation actions, at least in the short term. I used Tracy Aviary's mission, "inspire curiosity and caring for birds and nature through education and conservation" to explore different variables that may influence visitors' conservation intentions. These variables were level of engagement, knowledge (objective and subjective), past visitation, curiosity, and conservation caring. Through three research questions, I sought to understand relationships among these variables, as well as identify the strongest predictor(s) for visitors' conservation intentions. I administered questionnaires to a sample of 609 visitors between June and July, 2015. Results indicate that caring was the strongest single predictor for visitors' conservation intentions (predicting 53% of the variance) and caring scores increased as a result of a single visit. Subjective knowledge (what people think they know) influenced curiosity and caring more than objective knowledge (what they actually know). Curiosity had the highest values pre- and postvisit among all predictors, but was not a strong predictor of visitors' conservation intentions. Overall, these results provide points for discussion and can inform conservation education messaging, visitor outreach, and programming.