Better to be informed: Threatening bats increase recall of information

ABSTRACT

Bats are fascinating wildlife species. Yet, many citizens tend to perceive them as threatening. Such perceptions could influence citizens’ knowledge acquisition about bats. In terms of wildlife management, it is important to understand what citizens who perceive bats as threatening learn about bats. Evolutionarily, it is likely that humans process negative information about threatening bats more attentively as they may encounter them again in the future. Therefore, this study investigated how representations of bats as threatening affected participants’ recall of information by comparing a threatening representation to other representations of bats as cute, neutral, and imperiled. We hypothesized and found that representations of bats as threatening elicited recall of more negative pieces of information and more pieces of information overall than representations of bats as imperiled, neutral, or cute. Thus, threatening bats increased citizens’ knowledge acquisition. We discuss the implications for wildlife management.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge
• threats
• emotions

Acknowledgments

We wish to kindly thank Emily Corwin-Renner, Elisabeth Hayer, Luisa Hoffmann Vicente, Cara Limpächer, and Philipp Stark for their help with data collection and data coding. We are also grateful to Tanja Straka who kindly provided us with photographs of bats and gave us valuable feedback on the text about bats. We thank Andreas Zahn, Bernd Ohlendorf, and Oliver Lindecke for taking the photographs.

Conflict of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) under Grant number 03|O1728.