Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 14, 2022 erstellt
Description:
This study examines the psychological effect of public opinion on extreme environmental events. Using the sandstorm that hit China in the spring of 2021 as a natural experiment, we measure public opinion based on daily microblogs related to the environment published on Sina Weibo and show that local air pollution has a significant effect on environmental public opinion in cities in sandstorm-affected and nonaffected areas. Focusing on the cities in the nonaffected area, we find that a 10-unit increase in local air pollution generates a 3.83% increase in bystander public opinion response to the sandstorm event. We consider a range of rational mechanisms, such as the learning effect, mutual influence, and inattention, but none can fully explain the effect. Moreover, we explore the psychological mechanism and find that our results are consistent with projection effects