Householders’ Mental Models of Domestic Energy Consumption: Using a Sort-And-Cluster Method to Identify Shared Concepts of Appliance Similarity

If in-home displays and other interventions are to successfully influence people's energy consumption, they need to communicate about energy in terms that make sense to users. Here we explore householders' perceptions of energy consumption, using a novel combination of card-sorting and clustering to reveal shared patterns in the way people think about domestic energy consumption. The data suggest that, when participants were asked to group appliances which they felt naturally 'went together', there are relatively few shared ideas about which appliances are conceptually related. To the extent participants agreed on which appliances belonged together, these groupings were based on activities (e.g., entertainment) and location within the home (e.g., kitchen); energy consumption was not an important factor in people's categorisations. This suggests messages about behaviour change aimed at reducing energy consumption might better be tied to social practices than to consumption itself

Using Incentives and Social Information to Promote Energy Conservation Behavior

Improving the efficiency in the domestic energy consumption has become a showpiece of how behavioral economics can be applied to the field of environmental economics. This study builds upon the literature by providing subjects with individual and social energy performance information at group level in a controlled field experiment setting. We aim to test whether extrinsic incentives accentuate or crowd out the intrinsic motivation to save energy and how heterogeneity in environmental attitudes also impacts on electricity conservation. Besides, we test for the persistence of energy-saving habits after the information is removed. Results suggest that the provision of individual feedback and social information increase energy conserving behavior, with this being most effective among those who signaled in a previous stage preferences for pro-environmental and sustainable living. However, treatment variations indicate that subjects overall fail to maintain “good habits” once the intervention stops, with exception of pro-environmental subjects who continue to consume less electricity in the post-intervention phase. Furthermore, our findings indicate that rewarding groups in a competitive environment may create perverse long-run effects. While providing individual and social information could improve both consumer welfare and energy demand forecasting, the timescale, frequency, and mechanism undertaken require careful scrutiny and planning if these potential benefits are to be maximized and undesirable side effects prevented

Preferences for change: Do individuals prefer voluntary actions, soft regulations, or hard regulations to decrease fossil fuel consumption?

Pittsburgh residents (n = 209) reported their preferences for voluntary actions, soft regulations, and hard regulations to (a) limit the number of SUVs and trucks and (b) increase green energy use for household energy consumption. These two goals were presented in one of two motivating frames, as addressing either environmental or national security issues. For the goal of limiting SUVs and trucks, results indicated that participants favored voluntary actions over hard regulations, and soft regulations over voluntary actions. For the goal of increasing green energy, results indicated that participants preferred both voluntary actions and soft regulations over hard regulations, but had no significant preference between voluntary actions and soft regulations. How the problems were framed did not significantly affect participants' willingness to accept voluntary actions or regulations. Participants' environmental attitudes (as assessed using the New Ecological Paradigm scale) had a strong positive relationship with support for regulatory strategies intended to change the behaviors in question. Women were more likely to support voluntary actions than men. The loss of personal freedom was frequently mentioned as a reason for saying no to hard regulations

Public perception of energy consumption and savings

In a national online survey, 505 participants reported their perceptions of energy consumption and savings for a variety of household, transportation, and recycling activities. When asked for the most effective strategy they could implement to conserve energy, most participants mentioned curtailment (e.g., turning off lights, driving less) rather than efficiency improvements (e.g., installing more efficient light bulbs and appliances), in contrast to experts’ recommendations. For a sample of 15 activities, participants underestimated energy use and savings by a factor of 2.8 on average, with small overestimates for low-energy activities and large underestimates for high-energy activities. Additional estimation and ranking tasks also yielded relatively flat functions for perceived energy use and savings. Across several tasks, participants with higher numeracy scores and stronger proenvironmental attitudes had more accurate perceptions. The serious deficiencies highlighted by these results suggest that well-designed efforts to improve the public's understanding of energy use and savings could pay large dividends