Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
Spring 2024
Abstract
Rising health care costs in the United States have been historically shown to increase the U.S. consumers’ interest in medical tourism. The number of uninsured people in the United States is still astronomically high compared to other advanced economies around the world. As a result, medical tourism was on the rise for decades prior to Covid. The pandemic introduced certain stressors and higher levels of risk associated with both the travel and medical treatment services. While the majority of the U.S. population now has some kind of Covid immunity, the long term mental effects of Covid stress in everyday decision making related to medical care and travel persist. It remains to be answered to what extent these effects influence medical tourists’ attitude formation and how strong these effects are considering cross-cultural differences among holistic versus analytic consumers. Consumers with holistic cognitive style tend to pay greater attention to the field surrounding an evaluated object while consumers with analytic cognitive style tend to focus more on the cause-consequence relationship in their object evaluations (Nisbett et al., 2001). We propose that this difference in the strength of consideration of the field of other possible causes among the two culturally different groups of consumers will result in evaluations differences when making a judgment about the benefits versus costs associated with the medical tour.
Recommended Citation
Allman, H. F., Fenik, A. P., & Atadil, H. A. (2024). Medical tourism in the post-covid era: Cultural differences in attitude formation. The 2024 Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings, 24. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/amtp-proceedings_2024/24
