The Effects of Emotions on Stated Preferences for Environmental Change: a re-examination

A large literature in behavioral science suggests that people’s emotional condition can have an impact on their choices. We consider how people’s emotions affect their stated preferences and willingness to pay for changes in environmental quality, focusing on the effects of incidental emotions. We use videos to induce emotional states and test the replicability of the results reported in Hanley et al. (2017). Additionally, we employ Face Reader software to verify whether the intended emotional states were successfully induced in our experimental treatments. We find that our treatments succeed in implementing the predicted emotional condition in terms of self-reported emotions, but had a variable effect on measured (estimated) emotional states. We replicate the key result from Hanley et al. (2017): induced emotional state has no significant effect on stated preference estimates or on willingness to pay for environmental quality changes. Moreover, we confirm that, irrespective of the treatment assignment or emotional state - be it self-reported or measured - we observe no significant effect of emotion on stated preferences. We conclude that stated preference estimates for environmental change are unaffected by changes in incidental emotions, and that preference estimates are robust to the emotional state of the responder.