The chill of the moment: emotions and proenvironmental behavior

Abstract

Many serious problems, including those associated with the environment, warrant a sustained response, but the emotions that motivate action are often transient. The authors conducted five online experiments examining the impact of affective ads about global warming on proenvironmental behaviors. They find that sadness-inducing videos lead to more time devoted to an energy-footprint calculator and greater donations to an environmental organization than nonaffective videos. However, once emotions have cooled off after a delay, there are no differences in induced behavior between affective and nonaffective messages. Warning people that emotions, and their effects on behavior, cool off does not reverse the effects of the time delay unless people make a nonbinding commitment just after watching the affective ad. These results help to explain why emotion-evoking ads designed to promote proenvironmental behaviors, such as cutting energy use, often fail to produce sustained behavior change, and they suggest that those who seek to promote a sustained response may need to elicit behavioral commitments in moments of high emotion.