May 20, 2026 Behavior Change Webinar Series - Session 2 Emotional Appeals

This webinar shares more about carefully designing your emotional appeals intervention to match your ultimate desired behavior changes from real-world teams who have used this lever in their work. Featuring: WCS DRC, Wildlife Conservation Trust, Ranas, Centro para la Investigación de Tiburones (CIT) Emotions, such as pride, fear, and anger, are ever-present in human decisions. Emotional reactions to messaging, ideas, others’ behavior, and options presented influence actions. This influence occurs through discrete emotions experienced, values and sense of self, and/or social groups and community. In all cases, how something makes a person feel gives important information about how they are likely to act. Growing research shows that emotions can motivate actions. Sometimes, people talk about emotions as irrational or separate from reason, but humans can be both emotional and deliberate. For a person to care about something, to feel something, it probably has meaning to them — that feeling is worth paying attention to. As a result, leveraging emotions & tailoring messages to what matters most to people can be useful behavior change strategies.