You think your neighbors can drive the conservation of energy

You probably think of someone who embodies the mentality of "keeping pace with the Joneses" by behaving in an odious way. You can roll your eyes over a neighbor who is licking his immaculate lawn, armed with clones, but you probably still feel a tightness that keeps you within the limits of what our community considers normal. This apparently includes the conservation of energy.

In a new study, a team led by Jon Jachimowicz, of the Columbia Business School, and Oliver Hauser, of Exeter University, sought to better understand why efforts to reduce energy consumption had different results. . And they found evidence that community attitudes can make a bigger difference than personal attitudes.

Think of your neighbors

The researchers worked with data from a company called Opower, which shows utility customers how their energy consumption compares to others in their area. Opower randomly selects its participants and maintains a customer control group for comparison.

Data from 27 states, covering about 16 million households, show that the average energy savings achieved by the program in each state ranged from 0.8 to 2.6 percent. To study these differences, the researchers obtained 2,000 people spread over these same states to answer the questions of the survey. The questions covered two categories of beliefs: personal beliefs about the environmental value of reducing energy use and beliefs about what your neighbors think on the environmental value of reduced energy consumption.

Contrary to what you might expect, they found little correlation between personal beliefs about energy conservation and Opower's actual results in this state. However, there was a good correlation with beliefs about neighbors' attitudes. That is, the states where the Opower program was reducing energy use were not the states where more people thought it would be good for their environment. Instead, it was the states where more people felt that their neighbors agreed with this idea.

The Opower program shows its participants the average energy consumption of similar homes in their community – what their neighbors do, not the reason they do it. But researchers believe that your belief in your neighbors' intent has a big impact on how you respond to usage data.

Go with the crowd

To test this hypothesis, the researchers conducted a small experiment with more than 550 people via the mechanical service paid by Amazon. While Mechanical Turk has its share of criticism, the researchers thought its users were particularly well placed. Some results from Opower have suggested that the richest households reduce the most energy. Mechanical Turk's users, meanwhile, are younger, more diverse and less affluent than the US average – in other words, potentially a "harder" crowd in terms of the economy of the United States. # 39; energy.

In the experiment, the subjects were asked to imagine that their utility company had given them an Opower type report showing that they were using more energy than their neighbors. Then, the system pretended to collect true energy opinion data from the subjects' home county. Some subjects were told that people in their area were among the biggest proponents of environmentally friendly energy use. Others were told that their county was at the bottom of the list giving the opportunity to go green.

Subjects were then asked if they were willing to reduce their energy consumption next month. Of course, there was a difference between the two groups. It was not a huge difference – an increase of 0.5 points on a 7-point scale – but it was easily statistically significant. (However, it is fair to note that personal beliefs about the use of also significantly correlated with the results of this experiment, unlike the 2000 survey.)

The researchers say that their work shows something that has been observed in studies on racial prejudice, for example – the impression of cultural norms is a major factor of behavior. If you want to design effective policies or campaigns to encourage better energy efficiency, this implies that the solution may be better than telling people what their actions can do for their environment.

The researchers write:

Previous research has shown that our perception of our community and the likelihood that it chooses to cooperate rather than rolling freely exerts a strong influence on our own decision to cooperate. However, our findings suggest an additional component: what we think our community thinks of a problem affects our likelihood of acting. In other words, people could generally agree that reducing energy consumption is necessary to help the environment and save our planet, but to achieve this they must also believe that others do not care.

Human behavior nature, 2018. DOI: 10.1038 / s41562-018-0434-0 (About the DOIs).