Anticipating a Museum Visit: The Role of Museum Design in Anticipating Hedonic or Eudaimonic Well-Being Experiences

Through their design, museums can craft specific experiences for their visitors, ranging from more hedonic to more eudaimonic well-being experiences. Little is known, however, about whether potential visitors anticipate eudaimonic or hedonic well-being experiences depending on how the museum design is described. To answer this question, we conducted three social-psychological experiments with Croatian (Study 1, N = 128 and Study 3, N = 213) and American (Study 2, N = 289) participants. Participants in Study 1 and 2 read about either one of the two different hedonically designed museums or one eudaimonically designed museum which was the same across the studies, and then reported their anticipated well-being and emotional experience. Particularly for Studies 1 and 3, our findings revealed strong support for the differentiation of eudaimonic and hedonic well-being in the anticipation of different museum visits. Moreover, the anticipated eudaimonic experience moved beyond the typical positive hedonic experience by uniquely including both positive and negative emotions such as compassion, awe, sadness and guilt. We discuss the implications of our findings for modern psychological theorising on well-being and emotions, and, in a more applied sense, the relevance of describing the design of museums to potential visitors to guide their anticipation of the museum experience.