Research: Assessing and understanding hospitality: The brief hospitality scale
Paper (2019) by: Robert Biswas-Diener, Kostadin Kushlev, Rong Su, Fallon Goodman, Todd B. Kashdan, Ed Diener. Source: http://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v9i2.839.
I have read the paper so you don't have to. The 5 biggest lessons that teach you about the essence of hospitality, tourism and leisure management.
Hospitality is ubiquitous in daily life. Whenever we have friends over for dinner, host an old classmate for a few days, or throw a barbeque for neighbors, we engage in hospitable behavior. Though suc large and small social occasions likely play a role in the maintenance of social relationships and the development of community, hospitality has been largely overlooked by scholars of psychology in general, and wellbeing scholars in particular.
While social behavior is an essential factor in subjective wellbeing, hospitality does not appear in the indexes of widely used textbooks [or other academic literature] in positive psychology. […] Beyond positive psychology, hospitality does not even appear in the indexes of popular introductory psychology textbooks. As Rozin (2006) has pointed out, however, behavioral scientists need to focus more on important behaviors that characterize everyday life. This certainly applies to the topic of hospitality, which exists across cultures, economic status, and throughout history.
When researchers have examined the concept of hospitality, it has largely been within the scope of the hospitality industry. This industry includes businesses such as hotels and restaurants that provide food, shelter, and — to some degree — entertainment of guests. It should be noted, however, that the hospitality industry is fundamentally inadequate to define or describe hospitality as it occurs in everyday life. This is because the hospitality industry treats hospitality as a financial transaction.
Thus, while existing research has yielded important applied insights for the hospitality industry, a large gap remains in our basic understanding of the psychological  process of individual hospitality as it occurs in everyday life. Although psychologists have studied cooperation, altruism, generosity, and  related concepts, there is neither a robust literature on hospitality nor established theories or models.
Like happiness and empathy, hospitality may be a concept with nuanced and diverse definitions. The Oxford English dictionary defines hospitality as “friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers” and also as “cordiality, warmth, congeniality, sociability and generosity.” These two definitions suggest the complexity of the concept. On the one hand, hospitality is viewed in behavioral terms. It is a transaction between a host and a guest in which the former shares personal resources with the latter. For example, a host provides dinner or entertainment for a guest. On the other hand, as suggested by the second definition, hospitality is also viewed as an attitude. In this case, it is understood to be a quality of personality: an attitude of welcoming.
The investigation aimed to better understand a variety of psychological components of hospitality, including identity (a sense of self as hospitable), affect (enjoying hospitality), effort (whether it comes easily), and self-esteem (hospitality makes one feel good about oneself). [This has led to] a brief measure of hospitality [BHS].
The Brief Hospitality Scale
Please answer openly and honestly to each question using the scale provided to indicate the amount you agree or disagree with each statement below:
7 - Strongly agree | 6 - Agree | 5 - Slightly agree | 4 - Neither agree nor disagree | 3 - Slightly disagree | 2 - Disagree | 1 - Strongly disagree
- ____ I enjoy hosting others.
- ____ When I host others, I feel good about myself.
- ____ Being hospitable is something that comes easily to me.
- ____ I am a very hospitable person.
The BHS is used to examine common personality predictors, including the Five Factor model and perspective taking. Of the Five Factors, extroversion was the strongest predictor of overall hospitality. It may be that extroverts are particularly suited to the social aspects of hospitality (Grobelna, 2015). As expected, perspective taking was also very strongly associated with overall hospitality. It may be that the ability to “put one’s self in another person’s shoes” is a psychological skill that makes hospitality easier and more effective. Further investigation of the ways that individual differences affect hospitality is highly recommended to future researchers.
It is very informative that hospitality is so consistently associated with all forms of wellbeing – social wellbeing, subjective wellbeing, and general flourishing. It may be that hospitality contributes to wellbeing, or that it follows from it, and it is possible that the influence is bi-directional. It is also informative that hospitality is seen in generally positive ways across diverse cultures, and yet is most strongly associated with specific personality characteristics. The direction of causal influence and cultural variation in hospitality are both fruitful areas for future research.
An important task for future research will be to explore whether hospitality raises wellbeing, or whether people high in wellbeing simply tend to be more hospitable, or both. Alternately, a person’s social feelings in general could influence both wellbeing and hospitality.
