ABSTRACT
The basis of tourism is the interactions of tourist-local community, tourist-service personnel, and tourist-tourist. A critical issue for the tourism literature is to understand the effects of these encounters. Social psychology, which draws attention to the social context of the encounters in question and the social factors affecting them, is a discipline that has been applied in the field of tourism since the 1980s. The concept of social distance, which was put forward by Robert Park in sociology and developed by Emory Bogardus, is of great importance in understanding the attitude changes of tourists within the scope of social psychology.
The concept of social distance is the perceived affinity and mutual sympathy between different groups and describes the extent to which these groups are willing to interact with each other. Most of the pioneering studies were used social distancing to understand the interaction between the local community and tourists. Fundamentally, tourist-tourist interaction has always been the subject of less study than local community-tourist interaction. However, it is seen that tourist-tourist interaction (TTI) is the subject of studies in areas such as cruising, backpacking, group tours, and festivals. This chapter aims to explain tourists’ encounters with tourists from a social psychological perspective and explain the possible positive-negative effects of the mentioned encounters on the social distance between tourists.
