How much Fear? Exploring the Role of Integral Emotions on Stated Preferences for Wildlife Conservation

Abstract

Scientific evidence suggests that emotions affect actual human decision-making, particularly in highly emotionally situations such as human-wildlife interactions. In this study we assess the role of fear on preferences for wildlife conservation, using a discrete choice experiment. The sample was split into two treatment groups and a control. In the treatment groups the emotion of fear towards wildlife was manipulated using two different pictures of a wolf, one fearful and one reassuring, which were presented to respondents during the experiment. Results were different for the two treatments. The assurance treatment lead to higher preferences and willingness to pay for the wolf, compared to the fear treatment and the control, for several population sizes. On the other hand, the impact of the fear treatment was lower than expected and only significant for large populations of wolves, in excess of 50 specimen. Overall, the study suggests that emotional choices may represent a source of concern for the assessment of stable preferences. The impact of emotional choices is likely to be greater in situations where a wildlife-related topic is highly emphasized, positively or negatively, by social networks, mass media, and opinion leaders. When stated preferences towards wildlife are affected by the emotional state of fear due to contextual external stimuli, welfare analysis does not reflect stable individual preferences and may lead to sub-optimal conservation policies. Therefore, while more research is recommended for a more accurate assessment, it is advised to control the decision context during surveys for potential emotional choices.

Emotional states elicited by wolf videos are diverse and explain general attitudes towards wolves

“…This finding suggests that socio‐demographic parameters have idiosyncratic and context‐specific effects on attitudes. Similarly, although we expected to find important effects of regional factors on attitudes (Arbieu et al., 2019; Karlsson & Sjöström, 2007; Notaro & Grilli, 2022), only the distance to the closest wolf territory affected attitudes towards wolves. These results reinforce the strength of emotional factors in shaping attitudes towards wolves, with important implications for wolf conservation and the management of social conflicts.…”

“…Understanding these relations is therefore important in a context of human‐wildlife coexistence because emotions are expected to influence behaviours (Lerner et al., 2015) and decision‐making (Ghasemi et al., 2021; Wieczorek Hudenko, 2012). For instance, negative emotions have been shown to affect willingness to pay for wolf protection, and these relations between emotions and attitudes are modulated by contextual situations (Notaro & Grilli, 2022). However, we still have a limited understanding of the differential effects of other emotional states like joy, interest or anger on attitudes and we can reasonably expect diverging strategies for managing human‐wildlife encounters and coexistence in fear‐, anger‐, or joy‐dominated contexts.…”

Assessing immediate emotions in the theory of planned behavior can substantially contribute to increases in pro-environmental behavior

“…Specifically, research on immediate emotions generally have participants engage in tasks that activate their decision-making processes; this is done to accommodate the fact that immediate emotions are experienced during decision-making (Schlösser et al, 2013). For example, Notaro and Grilli's (2022) inquiry on how emotions shape public preferences for wildlife conservation had participants choose between different monetary amounts that they would donate to conservation efforts (Notaro and Grilli, 2022). It is also common for affective research to ascertain participants' immediate emotions via objective physiological measures, which is feasible given that immediate emotions are actually experienced (Schlösser et al, 2013).…”

“…• Participants are presented with various pro-environmental options and instructed to decide as if their selection was binding (Notaro and Grilli, 2022).…”

Enhancing Attention and Interest in Plants to Mitigate Plant Awareness Disparity

“…Attention, attitude, and relative interest are predominantly affective domains, while knowledge is purely cognitive. In this paper, we implicitly and explicitly investigated the three affective domains because of their crucial role in nature conservation [39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. It is suggested that organisms which capture human attention (e.g., by colour) also enhance their willingness to protect them [41,46,47].…”