Cognitive Biases and Pilgrim Spending Behaviour: A Behavioural Economics Perspective on Religious Tourism

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.59256/ijrtmr.20260604009

Published In

Volume 6, Issue 4 (2026)

Published Online

July-August 2026

Pages

80-87

Article Type

Review Article

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Pilgrimage tourism represents a significant and rapidly growing segment of the global travel industry, contributing substantially to local economies while simultaneously shaping pilgrims' consumption and spending behaviours. While substantial research has examined the religious, cultural, and motivational dimensions of pilgrimage, limited attention has been devoted to the psychological mechanisms underlying pilgrims' financial decision-making. Drawing upon behavioural economics and consumer behaviour theory, this article investigates how cognitive biases specifically over-optimism bias, social pressure, anchoring, loss aversion, present bias, and the sunk-cost fallacy influence pilgrims' spending behaviour. The planning fallacy leads pilgrims to set unrealistically optimistic budgets, while social pressure and status-signalling motivations encourage expenditure on donations, religious offerings, souvenirs, accommodation, and other pilgrimage-related purchases to conform to perceived social or religious expectations. Empirical evidence from tourism contexts demonstrates that high loss aversion and present bias significantly increase overspending, while anchoring effects powerfully skew willingness-to-pay for accommodation and services. This article proposes a comprehensive mixed-methods research design to empirically examine these relationships, integrating questionnaire surveys with experimental approaches and field observations. By integrating behavioural economics with pilgrimage tourism research, the study addresses a significant gap in the literature concerning the psychological determinants of pilgrimage expenditure. The anticipated findings are expected to contribute to consumer behaviour theory, pilgrimage tourism literature, and behavioural finance by providing insights into how cognitive biases shape financial decisions in religious contexts.