Context, aesthetics, and passive acceptance of drone transportation in metropolitan areas: A scenario-based experiment on causal and co-evaluation effects

• Experimental designs enable causal analysis of acceptance predictors of innovative technologies • Co-evaluation with aesthetics showed minor but non-negligible effects • Area of operation and usage strongly influence acceptance of drones • Survey reveals key factors behind acceptance (e.g., usefulness, time savings) • Disentangling of ambivalent key factors (e.g., environment) improved precision Reaching societal acceptance of overflights is critical for Urban and Advanced Air Mobility (UAM/AAM) systems, yet most evidence relies on survey-based or correlational data. The present study builds on a previous, scenario-based experiment to identify causal effects of contextual deployment factors on acceptance and aesthetics. Participants evaluated images of aerial objects that systematically varied in area of operation (industrial, urban, rural), usage (medical, commercial), and salience (orange, white). Drones were contrasted with a technical alternative (helicopter) and a natural reference (goose) to disentangle technology-specific effects from scene-based evaluations. The present study examined whether acceptance, rated either alone or alongside aesthetic judgments, elicited co-evaluation effects on acceptance patterns. Across analyses, usage and area emerged as the dominant drivers of acceptance: medical applications showed uniformly high acceptance across conditions, whereas commercial ones showed lower approval, depending on area and salience, and demonstrated a preference for drones over helicopters. The natural baseline showed opposite area preferences, highlighting object–context interactions. Co-evaluation of aesthetics produced only limited modulation of acceptance and did not alter the core contextual effects, indicating that acceptance judgments were largely robust to task framing. Response-time measures provided consistent evidence for greater deliberation in commercial and urban scenarios. Complementary survey assessed prior knowledge and experience, and self-rated reasons behind acceptance judgments. Together, the study provides experimentally grounded causal evidence on when and where public resistance to aerial systems is most likely to arise and informs engineering design choices, deployment strategies, and regulatory planning for future UAM/AAM operations with a transferable protocol.