The Role of Fear, Sadness, and Anger in Shaping Support for Climate Policies: Evidence from a UK Survey Experiment

Emotions play a significant role in motivating climate action, but the nature and the direction of the relationship between emotions and attitudes toward climate policy are relatively understudied. We conducted a survey experiment (United Kingdom, n = 1,330) in which we experimentally manipulated incidental emotions to consider the effects of fear, anger, and sadness on support for different climate policies. In terms of informative policies, the results show that inducing sadness significantly increases support for early warning systems for disaster predictions but has no notable effect on providing health risk information concerning climate change. Regarding protective policies, inducing fear positively and significantly influences support for banning petrol cars, while an immediate ban on coal plants shows no statistically significant effect. Interestingly, contrary to the expectations and findings in the literature, we found the negative effect of anger treatment on the support for punitive measures oriented toward high-electricity-consuming households and no effect on punitive measures against businesses and frequent flyers. Our findings highlight the potent influence of emotions in motivating support for specific climate policies, revealing their intricate nature. At times, certain emotions such as anger can even cause reduced support for climate policies.