Stable Beliefs, Shifting Emotions: The Effects of Incidental Hope and Fear Induction in Climate Policy Attitudes

Abstract

Emotions shape cognition, motivation, and decision-making behavior in many ways. While prior research has linked integral (naturally occurring) climate emotions to climate engagement, little experimental work has tested whether experimentally inducing incidental emotional states in a context independent of climate change shifts climate policy support. In the present study, participants completed an autobiographical writing task to induce a hope, fear, or neutral state. We examined the resulting support for various climate mitigation policies, hypothesizing that hope induction would increase support for proactive policies while fear induction would increase support for regulatory policies based on their action tendencies. We also explored whether these effects vary by political identity and climate beliefs, which are more stable and contain emotionally rich information, unlike the isolated and transient emotional states induced in the study. Emotion induction successfully shifted self-reported emotions in the intended directions; however, it had little effect on overall policy support, which was instead consistently predicted by pre-existing climate beliefs and political identity. Policy support ratings for Democrats were largely unaffected by emotion, potentially due to ceiling effects in climate belief and policy support. Exploratory analyses revealed that among Republicans, a hope state increased support for a ban on the purchase of new gas or diesel cars relative to fear and neutral conditions, possibly reflecting a misattribution of positive feelings to the policy judgment and greater cognitive flexibility under hope. Overall, these results indicate that stable political identity and climate beliefs, rather than transient incidental emotions, are the primary drivers of climate policy support, while incidental emotion states demonstrate small, policy-specific effects. Keywords: emotions, climate policy support, political identity, climate beliefs