https://www.facebook.com/100877439344968/

Vre Tracks

Instagram is making you a worse tourist. Here’s how to travel respectfully

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. CNN is showcasing the work of The Conversation, a collaboration between journalists and academics to provide news analysis and commentary. The content is produced solely by The Conversation.

Travel is back in full swing this summer, and so is bad behaviour by tourists.

Popular destinations have seen an uptick in incidents involving tourists in recent years. Reports of a man defacing the Colosseum in Rome shows that behavior has deteriorated even in places that rarely had problems in the past.

What’s behind these abhorrent acts? One answer, my research shows, is social media. Instagram and TikTok have made it easy to find “hidden gem” restaurants and discover new destinations to add to your bucket list. But this democratization of travel has had other consequences.

Because people now see their social media connections from their home environment traveling in an exotic location, they assume (consciously or not) that behaviour they ordinarily carry out at home is also acceptable in that vacation destination.

This is known as social proof, when we look to the behaviors of others to inform our own actions. People are likely to act more hedonistically while on vacation. Now, travelers also look to social media for proof of how others behave. If their peers from home are throwing caution to the wind while on vacation, this can cause a domino effect of bad behavior.

I’ve identified other bad travel attitudes and habits that have emerged as a result of social media-driven tourism.

For example, the identifiable victim effect, which explains how people are more likely to sympathize with victims of tragedies when they know who those victims are. Because tourists are often sheltered in hotels and resorts away from local communities, they might (wrongly) think that traveling to a place far from home is an opportun