Are visitors’ satisfaction reliable? A perspective from museum visitor behavior

In general, it is believed that the length of time a visitor spends in a museum can reflect the visitor’s preference to some extent. However, in the process of evaluating the exhibition, we discovered that some visitors who provided positive feedback did not pay sufficient attention during their visit. This article explores the relationship between visitor behavior and satisfaction, as well as its underlying causes. We conducted a mixed-methods case study of an ancient art gallery in the Shandong Museum in China. The research findings confirmed the presence of this phenomena. We discovered that the majority of visitors who provided positive feedback did not pay sufficient attention throughout their visit to the exhibition. To explore the causes of this phenomena, we further studied the disparities in visitor orientation and motivation among those who provided varying feedback. The results indicate that these disparities can be explained by John Falk’s identity-related motivation theory, according to which visitors’ behavior and levels of satisfaction reflect their unique identities. This result, on the one hand, broadens the applicability of identity motivation theory in satisfaction research, and on the other, it requires museums to pay more attention to the feedback’s underlying motives when performing visitor evaluation.