Greening Up with the Joneses

In the quest to save the environment people often underestimate the impact of one thing we have total control over...ourselves. Yesterday Obama touted a new standard for light bulbs and more cities are now mandating recycling.

That's a start but we can also be incentivized to do more and all it takes is a little info.

From the Atlantic...

A few years ago a professor at Arizona State University conducted a study comparing the effects of those hotel-bathroom placards that ask guests to reuse towels, testing four slightly different messages. The first sign had the traditional message, asking guests to “do it for the environment.” The second asked guests to “cooperate with the hotel” and “be our partner in this cause” (12% less effective than the first). The third stated that the majority of guests in the hotel reused towels at least once during their stay (18% more effective). The last message was even more specific: it said that the majority of guests “in this room” had reused their towels. It produced a 33% increase in response behavior over the traditional message.

When made aware of the social norm, subjects tended to adhere to it. Cialdini terms this effect “social proof.”

Now Cialdini is applying that concept to energy consumption. Positive Energy has created software that assesses energy usage by neighborhood. Results are sent to consumers on behalf of their utility, praising you with a row of smiley faces (you’ve used 58 percent less electricity than your neighbors this month!) or damning you with none (you used 39 percent more electricity than your neighbors in the past 12 months, and it cost you $741 extra).

In Positive Energy’s reports, a once-intangible bit of social information—how much energy you use relative to your neighbors—is made tangible. Now you can find out not just what people in the same city are doing, but what people in your neighborhood, living in the same-size houses, are doing.

Keeping up with the Joneses may be cliché, but it seems to work: in Sacramento, where Positive Energy began its pilot program people who received personalized “compared with your neighbors” data on their statements reduced their energy use by more than 2 percent over the course of a year. In energyspeak, a 2 percent reduction is huge; with the pilot sample of 35,000 homes, it’s the equivalent of taking 700 homes off the grid.