Charismatic species should be large: The role of admiration and fear

Abstract Humans show strong preferences for large, “charismatic” animals. However, the ultimate reasons for these innate preferences remain unclear. In our research, we investigate the affective components of human attitudes toward animals, as well as the willingness to pay (WTP) for their conservation in a sample of N = 549 Slovak people using an online questionnaire. From the use of structural equation modelling, we discovered that particularly large animals trigger both biophobic (fear) and biophilic (admiration) emotions in humans, and as a result, these emotions have contrasting effects on the WTP for animal conservation. Both fear and admiration of animals were influenced by the same emotions triggered by non‐animal objects. Beliefs in the magical power of animals did not directly influence the WTP animal conservation, but was mediated by the admiration of large, non‐animal objects. Females showed greater WTP animal conservation than males, irrespectively of the size of the species. Therefore, we believe that biophobic responses from large animals and non‐animal objects in contemporary humans were inherited from our mammalian ancestors, who were targets of predation by large prehistoric reptiles throughout a significant part of mammalian evolutionary history. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.