You poor little thing! The role of compassion for wildlife conservation

ABSTRACT

Citizens can engage in wildlife conservation by participating in citizen science (CS) projects about wildlife. Interest in wildlife and science has been found to be one motivation for CS participation. Yet, we suggest that emotional responses, such as compassion for suffering, injured, or distressed wildlife, are relevant motivations that have so far been understudied. Compassion is known to increase behavioral intentions to alleviate suffering and, thus, is likely to have beneficial consequences for wildlife CS projects. Therefore, our two studies investigated the impact of different wildlife photographs on compassion, attitudes toward CS, and intentions to engage in CS. We found that photographs of distressed raccoons and foxes increased compassion, which thereby increased attitudes toward CS projects and some intentions to participate in these projects. Thus, compassion may be a relevant factor for increasing citizens’ engagement in wildlife conservation. We discuss the implications of our findings for CS and wildlife conservation.

KEYWORDS:

• Compassion
• wildlife conservation
• citizen science
• intentions
• attitudes

Acknowledgments

We wish to kindly thank Emily Corwin-Renner, Dennis Hafner, Elisabeth Hayer, Luisa Hoffmann Vicente, Jonas Honecker, Simone Korger, Cara Limpächer, Nina Beatrice Maier, Katharina Maschke, and Tim Mori for their help with data collection and data coding. We are also grateful to the Associate Editor and the reviewers for their valuable and constructive feedback.

Disclosure 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 [01|O1728].