May I Change Your Mind? The Role of Emotions and Personalization in Overcoming NIMBY Resistance

Sammanfattning

Public resistance to renewable energy projects, despite widespread public support,is often described as a Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon. Thisstudy investigates how emotional ambiguity and personalized communicationinfluence public attitudes, support, and willingness to bear the burden in thecontext of wind-power projects in Sweden. Using a quantitative online experiment(N = 87), participants were exposed to either high or low emotionalambiguity messages, with their emotional responses analyzed using NaturalLanguage Processing and entropy metrics. The results show that while exposureto project-related communication generally increases support for windpower projects, neither manipulated message ambiguity nor participants’ ownexpressed emotional ambiguity significantly affected attitudes or willingnessto bear the burden. However, among participants experiencing high emotionalambiguity, support increased with low-ambiguity messages and decreased withhigh-ambiguity messages. This suggests that emotional clarity in communicationcan help resolve ambivalence and foster support, particularly amongthose with initially mixed feelings. These findings contribute to the literatureby introducing a scalable computational method for measuring emotional ambiguityand by refining theoretical perspectives on NIMBY resistance. Thestudy highlights the limited effectiveness of emotional personalization in thiscontext and suggests that clear, consistent communication may be a moreeffective strategy for increasing public support for contested but socially beneficialprojects.