Affective influences on the evaluation of environmental statements

We carry out a between-subjects experiment via a web-based questionnaire. In the questionnaire, first we ask the participants' secondary and tertiary educational degree, age, gender and environmental attitude, each with one closed-ended item. Next, affect (three valence conditions: negative, neutral or positive) is induced by displaying photos. After any set of five photos - while each photo is displayed for five seconds -, depending on fictionality condition, participants see a non-fictional or a fictional environmental statement. The fictional environmental statements have been constructed in a parallel way to the non-fictional statements, both in content and length, but they depict the situation as happening on the imaginary planet Tulania rather than in Germany on planet Earth. Participants evaluate each environmental statement by responding to five evaluative ratings: (1) personal importance, (2) civil importance, (3) personal sacrifice for amelioration, (4) support of legislative measures for amelioration, (5) support of incentivization for amelioration. In total, there are five environmental statements, each being preceded by five photos and followed by five evaluative ratings, as described above. We ask participants to read aloud each environmental statement and its five evaluative ratings. To check for the success of affect manipulation we employ Self-Assessment Manikins: one manikin assessing valence, one manikin assessing arousal. One random third of participants gets this manipulation check after the first instance of affect induction, while two thirds of participants get this manipulation check after having evaluated all five environmental statements. Participants have the choice of taking one webcam shot of themselves prior to evaluating a statement and/or initiate a sound recording when evaluating a statement, which are two quasi-experimental factors in the research design. As a behavioral measure, we offer participants to donate their participation reward of 1 EUR to the environmental charity WWF or entering their 1 EUR into a kitty whose content will be raffled to three participants who had entered their 1 EUR in the kitty or waiving their 1 EUR participation reward. The data will be analyzed by applying variance analytical methods if conditions for parametric tests hold; if not data are analyzed using nonparametric methods. To reduce false-positive errors from multiple testing, we adopt the alpha-adjustment procedure by Benjamini and Hochberg (1994). We conduct all tests as two-tailed, as prior research has obtained mixed results. First, we examine the success of the affect manipulation (manipulation check). We test whether affect influences the evaluative ratings and the behavioral measure. Thereby, we examine as a moderator as to whether affect influences the evaluation of the evaluative ratings differently as a function of the fictionality of the environmental statement (non-fictional versus fictional). Furthermore, we examine environmental attitude as a moderator of the influence of affect on the evaluative ratings and the behavioral measure. Moreover, we examine as control variables secondary and tertiary educational degree, age, gender, timing of manipulation check, number of webcam shots taken and number of sound recordings taken. The affective content of the webcam shots and sound recordings is merely explored given the novelty of this strand of research. We plan to have a sample of at least N = 1,634 German speaking participants residing in Germany (over 17, no further restrictions). Participants stem from SoSci Panel. Upon reaching the above sample size, we will cease to advertise the study, but will not close the study before the field time has elapsed, thus allowing participation as long as the field time has not elapsed. The field time is 14 days. The field period starts 20 Feb 2024. Participation via smartphone is discouraged and technically blocked, because a smartphone's small screen is assumed to reduce the effectiveness of the affect induction. We anticipate that the technical blocking does not work perfectly; however, because of the verbal discouragement and the technical blocking, most participants are anticipated to take part other than via smartphone. In the negative valence affect condition, at the end of the questionnaire, participants self-pace five remedial photos of positive valence.