Influence mechanisms and management implications of tourist heritage responsibility behavior from the perspective of value co-creation

Guiding tourists to adopt heritage responsibility behaviors is a critical measure for ensuring the sustainability of agricultural cultural heritage. By combining the cognitive affective affective theory and value-belief-norm theory, this study integrates tourists' rational cognition and subjective emotions to construct a theoretical framework of the driving mechanism underlying heritage responsibility behavior in agricultural cultural heritage sites. The proposed mechanisms are then empirically tested using regression analysis. The results show that heritage responsibility behavior is directly influenced by self-interest, altruism, ecological value cognition, heritage identity, and social responsibility. Both heritage identity and social responsibility play significant mediating roles—individually and sequentially—in the relationship between tourists' value cognition and heritage responsibility behavior. Moral norms have positive and negative regulatory effects on ecological benefits, self-interested value cognition, and heritage responsibility behavior, respectively, but show no regulatory effect on altruistic value cognition. The article improves the mechanism for the formation of tourist heritage responsibility behavior and extends it to the context of agricultural cultural heritage tourism. The proposed countermeasures can provide reference for driving sustainable tourism behavior among tourists and sustainable development of heritage sites.