Tourists tend to conform to the majority in their purchase decisions to avoid negative outcomes. Therefore, newly developed yet unpopular tourism destinations are facing difficulty of promotion. On the basis of evolutionary psychology, this study aims to provide a technique of selling unpopular tourism destinations based on tourists’ mating motive, as implied by evolutionary psychology. Many studies have focused on situations when people conform to the majority, whereas a few studies have indicated that individuals also deliberately follow the minority in purchase decisions (Chan et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2012). Research indicates that individuals tend to showcase unique products to attract mates (Chen et al., 2022; Durante & Griskevicius, 2016). Tourists’ mating motive may be activated when their travel decisions are related to mating success. This study hypothesizes that to display differentiation, tourists with activated mating motives are more likely to choose minority-endorsed (vs. majority-endorsed) tourism destinations. Moreover, to verify the evolutionary explanation of tourists’ preference for minority-endorsed destinations, the current study also tests the mediation effect of uniqueness seeking, which has been regarded as a consequence of mating motive and an antecedent of individuals’ disconformity to the majority (Griskevicius, Cialdini, et al., 2006; Imhoff & Erb, 2009). Based on a scenario-based experiment, this study identified the effect of mating motive on tourists’ preference for minority-endorsed tourism destinations. First, tourists’ mating motives positively influence their preference for minority-endorsed tourism destinations. Second, tourists’ uniqueness seeking fully mediates the effect of mating motive on preference for minority-endorsed tourism destinations. The findings inform the tourism industry an effective way to promote unpopular destinations. Tourists are inclined to follow the choice or opinions of others, particularly when tourists are highly uncertain about their decision outcomes. Therefore, tourism marketers usually utilize social clues in their promotion messages such as “popular choice” and “best sellers.” However, newly developed tourism products that lack awareness, though providing high-quality experience, are facing tremendous difficulty of selling. The current study suggests that the less popular destinations can be rebranded and promoted to target romantically motivated tourists.

Lentinula edodes shows atypical mating behaviors deviated from tetrapolar mating in outcrossing. To better understand the mating behavior, we investigated variations in the mating type genes, residing in A and B mating loci, of 129 dikaryotic strains from East Asia. Through sequence analysis of A locus, we found that hypervariable region spanning N-term of HD2-intergenic region-N-term of HD1 could represent A mating type of L. edodes. Mating and hypervariable region analyses revealed 50 unique A mating types: 27 from 98 cultivated strains, 33 from 31 wild strains, and 10 commonly found. It was also revealed that only a few A mating type alleles such as A1, A4, A5, and A7 were prevalent in cultivated strains. The A mating type in wild strains were highly diverse: 23 unique A alleles were discovered in small mountainous area in Korean peninsula. The B locus was assessed by allelic variations in pheromone (PHB) and pheromone receptor (RCB) pairs. Sequence analyses revealed 5 alleles of RCB1 with 9 associated PHBs in B sublocus and 3 alleles of RCB2 with 5 associated PHBs in B sublocus. Each RCB was primarily associated with two PHBs. This allowed us to propose 15 B mating types via combinations of five B and three B subloci. Thus, the total number of mating types in L. edodes became 750 through a combination of 50 A and 15 B. This number will further increase because of rapid diversification of A mating type and possible emergence of variants of RCBs and PHB-RCB combinations.