Topic ll: Emotional and Ethical Evaluation of Environmental Risks

One research topic focuses upon the evaluation of environmental risks. Two determinants of risks judgement were distinguished: potential consequences and ethical principles. Both judgmental aspects are assumed to arouse specific emotions, e.g. fear of possible damage or anger about the irresponsibility of the perpetrator. These emotions lead to different types of behavioural tendencies.

The following questions have been investigated:
- Do ethical considerations play a role in environmental risk evaluation?
- Which emotions do people experience with respect to environmental risks?
- In what way do risk judgements and moral evaluations influence emotions and consequent behaviour?

On the basis of previous studies (topic I) in which we investigated lay people´s  concepts of the causes and consequences of environmental risks, three types of risks are distinguished: Environmental risks can be perceived as threats
- that originate from humans and affect the environment (ME),
- that are of natural origin and jeopardise humans (EM), or
- that originate from anthropogenic environmental change and put humans at risk (MEM).

We assume that the perceived risk type determines whether the evaluation of the risk is based primarily on potential consequences or on ethical values (Jancer & Hoff 1994; Stern, Dietz & Kalof 1993).
In our studies we investigated the connection between the causal structure of a risk and the evaluative focus. Furthermore, we asked which specific emotions are elicited by environmental risks. Drawing on cognitive emotion theories (e.g., Ortony, Clore and Collins 1988), we distinguish two types of emotion: consequence-based emotions (e.g., worry, fear, grief) and moral-based emotions (e.g., guilt, shame, indignation, outrage).

In addition to that, we investigated if different types of emotion initiate different types of behavioural tendencies.