Not all who wander are lost: wanderlust as a psychological driver of international mobility and migration

人类从未像今天这样移动的。截至2013年，有超过400万学生在国外学习-预计到2025年这一数字将增加到700万。根据关于这种流动的心理基础的有限的科学文献，这些学生中的大多数既不是被经济或政治力量赶出他们的国家，也不是主要出于战略性的职业决定，简历提升或学术考虑。然而，在没有这些因素的情况下，不清楚这种流动的主要动力是什么。为了回答这个问题，我建议引入一个迄今为止被忽视的心理结构：旅行癖。因此，我将旅行癖概念化为一种具有情绪状态成分的基本人格特质，这需要一种强烈的动机性外向驱动力，并表现为提升的预期和实际流动性。在三个工作包中，我的博士学位致力于（1）开发一个心理测量学上合理的，广泛验证的定量旅行癖测量，（2）阐明旅行癖作为学生流动性的驱动力的动机力量，并将其功能和潜在过程与动机心理学中的突出框架联系起来，例如饱足周期和动机可塑性原则，（3）通过工具变量分析，追溯北美大规模样本中旅行癖的历史根源，并将其与当代经济、政治和社会结果联系起来。

Humankind has never been more mobile than today. As of 2013 there are more than 4 million students studying abroad - a figure which is expected to rise to 7 million by 2025. According to the limited scientific literature on the psychological underpinnings of such mobility, the majority of these students are neither pushed out of their countries by economic or political forces, nor primarily motivated by strategic career decisions, CV enhancement or academic considerations. However, in the absence of these factors, it is unclear what the main impetus of said mobility is. To answer that question, I propose the introduction of a hitherto overlooked psychological construct: wanderlust. Thereby, I conceptualise wanderlust as a basic personality trait with an emotional state component, that entails a strong motivational outward drive and manifests itself in elevated intended and actual mobility. Across three working packages my PhD sets out to (1)develop a psychometrically sound, extensively validated quantitive wanderlust measure, (2) elucidate the motivational force of wanderlust as a driver of student mobility and link its functioning and underlying processes to prominent frameworks in motivation psychology, such as the satiation cycle and the principle of motivational plasticity, (3) trace back the historical origins of wanderlust in a North American large-scale sample via instrumental variable analysis and relate them to contemporary economic, political and social outcomes.