Monetary compensation can increase public support for the siting of hazardous facilities

• We examine the effectiveness of monetary compensation in siting hazardous facilities.
• Three experiments show that offering monetary compensation is not always ineffective.
• People are more positive if the offer is (vs. is not) redefined to have sacred value.
• Perceived commensurability and experienced emotion mediate this effect.
• Offering monetary compensation can thus help to prevent or solve siting controversies.

In this paper, we propose that the offering of monetary compensation can be useful to prevent or solve controversies regarding the siting of hazardous facilities as long as it is ‘rhetorically redefined’ as having sacred (moral) rather than merely secular (non-moral) value. The results of three experiments confirmed our predictions. People were more supportive of the decision to accept a hazardous facility in a community when monetary compensation was (versus was not) rhetorically redefined as having sacred value. This effect was (partially) mediated by the perceived commensurability of the compensation offer and the risk associated with the facility (Experiments 1–3) and experienced emotion (Experiment 3). Furthermore, the effect was quite robust: It was neither affected by the explicitness with which the decision-making authority had considered the monetary value of a human life, nor by the height of the compensation offer, nor by how the decision-making authority had justified its decision.