Feeling Good and Financing Impact: Affective Judgements as a Tool for Social Investing

This article examines how investors’ emotional responses—“affective judgments”—influence decisions in social investing. Drawing on behavioral ethics, it argues that feelings like empathy and compassion shape investor perceptions of social impact, risk, and trustworthiness of opportunities. The authors propose a conceptual framework linking such affective mechanisms to investment evaluation processes, suggesting that harnessing or calibrating emotions intentionally could improve impact investment outcomes and decision transparency.