Objectives  National parks are areas with complex human-land relationships, frequent human-nature interactions, and high ecosystem sensitivity and vulnerability, where multiple stakeholders converge. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a psychological contract to explore the relationship between national parks and visitors, which is the key subject of ecotourism, to provide ideas for realizing the sharing of ecological value in China’s national parks, and exploring the establishment of a cooperation mechanism between national parks and various social subjects with a common goal.

  Methods  To sort out and review the origin, development, connotation, and application of the concept of the psychological contract in tourism research, as well as ecotourism activities and other related literature, based on which theoretical reflection and model construction were carried out.

  Results  Psychological contract currently existed in the application of tourism field with the problems of unclear subject-object relationships and unclear conceptual interpretations et, al. When applying the psychological contracts to describe the relationship between national parks and visitors in the Chinese context, key points such as the subject-object relationship, individual roles, and the demands of both parties should be clarified. Visitor Psychological Contract for National Park Ecotourism can operate as a concept used to describe the relative cognitive and affective congruence between national parks and visitors, and its conceptual dimensions including three aspects: Goal Identification, Rights Expectations, and Obligation Commitments. Taking into account the specific context of Chinese society, social identity and collectivism theories have been added to form a new explanatory framework. There are four characteristics of the Visitor Psychological Contract for National Park Ecotourism: specificity of the object, plurality of elements, comparability of degree, and spatial and temporal dynamism.

  Conclusions  It is necessary to explore the development of ecotourism in national parks from the perspective of visitors’ psychological cognition, to provide a reference for the development of ecotourism in national parks, which is suitable for China’s national conditions. Future research should pay attention to the psychological contracts of different objects of national parks, to set up an effective measurement system and to expand the temporal and spatial scales of the research.