Impact of NGOs’ undercover videos on citizens’ emotions and pro-social behaviors

Undercover videos have become a popular tool among NGOs to influence public opinion and generate engagement for the NGO's cause. These videos are seen as a powerful and cost‑effective way of bringing about social change, as they provide first‑hand evidence and generate a strong emotional response among those who see them. In this paper, we empirically assess the impact of undercover videos on support for the cause. We in addition analyze whether the increased engagement among viewers is driven by the negative emotional reactions produced by the video. To do so, we design an online experiment that enables us to estimate both the total and emotion‑mediated treatment effects on engagement by randomly exposing participants to an undercover video (of animal abuse) and randomly introducing a cooling‑off period. Using a representative sample of the French population (N=3,310), we find that the video successfully increases actions in favor of animals (i.e., donations to NGOs and petitions), but we fail to prove that this effect is due to the presence of primary emotions induced by the video. Last, we investigate whether activists correctly anticipate their undercover videos' (emotional) impact via a prediction study involving activists (exploratory analysis).