The impact of emotions on the evaluation of environmentally damaging entrepreneurial opportunities: an experimental study.

Introduction: Prior scholarly work examined the effects of emotions on evaluations of entrepreneurial opportunities, which were typically non-context-specific. Thus, while the literature on the role of affect in judgments of entrepreneurial projects is prominent, the question of how eco-emotions are connected with evaluations of environmentally damaging entrepreneurial opportunities remains unanswered. Methods: This study utilized an experimental design to test the impact of three discrete emotions (hope, compassion, and anger) on the evaluation of environmentally damaging entrepreneurial opportunities, using a sample of 304 undergraduate students. The primary statistical methods employed were linear mixed-effects models and estimated marginal means contrasts. Results: In the screened sample, the anger condition was associated with statistically significant differences in more than one specification. Hope was context-dependent across opportunity types, whereas compassion did not differ significantly from the Control condition. Effect sizes were generally small; the two largest approached but did not reach the conventional medium benchmark. In the full-sample sensitivity analysis (N = 377), estimates were directionally similar, but the principal screened-sample findings were not confirmed. Discussion: These findings indicate that environmentally relevant emotions show different patterns in hypothetical entrepreneurial opportunity evaluation: anger showed the most consistent pattern, hope was context-dependent, and compassion showed no detectable difference relative to the Control condition. The findings contribute to the theoretical scope of the Appraisal Tendency Framework by examining emotion-specific patterns in the evaluation of environmentally damaging entrepreneurial opportunities, a judgment domain in which environmental harm is an explicit feature of the opportunity being evaluated. The variation observed across emotions and scenarios suggests potential boundary conditions for the application of the framework in this judgment domain. From a practical perspective, the findings suggest that emotional context may be relevant to understanding how environmentally damaging entrepreneurial opportunities are evaluated. However, given the student sample, generally small effect sizes, hypothetical scenarios, and sensitivity to the screening procedure, these practical implications should be considered preliminary and should not be interpreted as prescriptive guidance for entrepreneurs or policymakers.