UCLA. US: Telling people how much pollution they could prevent is more likely to reduce power use than touting cost savings.
What would inspire you to cut your electricity use: Finding out how
much money you could save, or knowing how much cancer-causing air
pollution you could eliminate?
A multidisciplinary study conducted at UCLA showed that eliminating pollution is the more powerful motivator.
People who regularly heard how much money they could save made
virtually no changes, while repeated messages focused on environmental
benefits caused people to cut their energy use an average of 8 percent.
The study also found that the environmental message was especially
effective in changing the behavior of people with children living in the
home — they reduced their electricity use a whopping 19 percent. The study was published today in the journal PNAS.
Residential
and commercial buildings account for more than two-thirds of U.S.
energy usage — transportation and industry account for most of the rest —
but the factors that would convince people to conserve aren’t well
known. The UCLA project, called Engage, is aimed at understanding those
motivations and how to encourage them, said Magali Delmas, the study’s
principal investigator and an environmental economist at the UCLA
Anderson School of Management.
“We’re finding that you have to bundle the public good with the
private good,” said Delmas, who also is a member of UCLA’s Institute of
the Environment and Sustainability. “Our message about health and the
environment reminds people that environmentalism is also about them and
their kids.”
The researchers divided participants into two groups. After a
six-month trial period to measure each apartment’s baseline energy use,
all the participants received weekly emails for four months telling them
how much more energy they used than their most efficient neighbor. One
group also was told how much more they paid for energy than that
neighbor; the second group was informed about how many more pounds of
air pollution they were creating than the neighbor — and reminded that
air pollution is linked to diseases like childhood asthma and cancer.
The researchers believe the environment-focused messages were
effective because it actually combined two ideas — that energy
reductions would cut air pollution and reduce the risk for the diseases
it caused — so people saw the benefit for themselves and society. The
cost-savings pitch might have been less effective in part because
electricity is relatively inexpensive, said co-author Omar Asensio, a
UCLA doctoral student studying economics and environmental sciences and
engineering.
“For most people at our field site, the savings for cutting back to
using the same as their most efficient neighbor would only be $4 to $6
per month. That’s a fast-food combo meal or a couple of gallons of
milk.”
The trial period ran from October 2011 to March 2012, and the study
was conducted from March through July 2012 by researchers from multiple
UCLA departments, who devised and installed smart-metering systems for
118 apartments at the campus’s University Village, which provides
housing for graduate students and their families.
The team also created a website that enabled them — and the residents
— to track historical and real-time electricity use, and to see
energy-use data for individual appliances and systems, like the
dishwasher or the home’s heating and cooling. Residents could track
spikes in energy use when they opened the fridge, steady plateaus when
they stayed up late working on their computers, or power dips when they
were out for the day.
“Electricity is still largely invisible to people,” Delmas said. “We want to help them see it.”
Some participants even experimented with ways to lower their
electricity needs. One family found that simply moving cereal boxes away
from the top of their refrigerator improved airflow so much that the
fridge used less electricity.
“Knowledge of personal electrical energy usage is inaccessible to
most individuals,” said co-principal investigator William Kaiser, a
professor at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied
Science, who helped design and build the smart meters. “Our objective is
to monitor and optimize energy-usage guidance for individuals to
produce direct benefits in conservation.”
Victor Pinto and Paulina Morales participated in the study and
received notices focused on the environment. Although Pinto disliked the
guilt trip, Morales said it made her determined to improve.
“The message reminds you that you’re hurting people and the planet,”
Morales said. “It made me more conscious of the energy I was using.”
To select which messages to test, the research team put the study
participants into focus groups and asked them what information they
thought would best motivate them to reduce their energy use. Options
included comparing their carbon footprint to car emissions, knowing the
number of homes in Kenya their electricity use would support, or
understanding how many trees it would take to absorb their carbon
dioxide. Ironically, most predicted that cost savings would influence
them most.
“People are notoriously bad at predicting their future behavior,”
said Stephanie Vezich, a UCLA psychology doctoral student. “They think
cost savings are going to motivate their behavior, but when you actually
test these different ideas, providing the cost information is actually
the least effective.”
In addition to the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability,
UCLA Engineering and UCLA Anderson, the study drew experts from
economics, psychology and business, and relied on cooperation from UCLA
Housing and Hospitality. It followed up on earlier research
that put smart meters inside UCLA dorm rooms to learn what motivated
undergraduates to save energy. The research supports UCLA’s first Grand Challenge project, which aims to move Los Angeles to renewable energy and local water by 2050 while protecting biodiversity.
The Engage study also compiled an unprecedented amount of detail
about how people use electricity, appliance by appliance. Residents saw
how their dishwasher’s electricity consumption compared to that of their
oven, hair dryer or air conditioner, and the researchers learned where
people were willing to cut back.