May I Change Your Mind? The Role of Emotions and Personalization in Overcoming NIMBY Resistance

Public resistance to renewable energy projects, despite widespread public support, is often described as a Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon. This study investigates how emotional ambiguity and personalized communication influence public attitudes, support, and willingness to bear the burden in the context of wind-power projects in Sweden. Using a quantitative online experiment (N = 87), participants were exposed to either high or low emotional ambiguity messages, with their emotional responses analyzed using Natural Language Processing and entropy metrics. The results show that while exposure to project-related communication generally increases support for wind power projects, neither manipulated message ambiguity nor participants’ own expressed emotional ambiguity significantly affected attitudes or willingness to bear the burden. However, among participants experiencing high emotional ambiguity, support increased with low-ambiguity messages and decreased with high-ambiguity messages. This suggests that emotional clarity in communication can help resolve ambivalence and foster support, particularly among those with initially mixed feelings. These findings contribute to the literature by introducing a scalable computational method for measuring emotional ambiguity and by refining theoretical perspectives on NIMBY resistance. The study highlights the limited effectiveness of emotional personalization in this context and suggests that clear, consistent communication may be a more effective strategy for increasing public support for contested but socially beneficial projects.