IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2018 - 33

comparative feedback, which highlights one's own energy trials (run by the company oPower) in different parts of the
use in relation to important others, has also shown success in United States have observed energy savings of around 2%, comreducing energy consumption. comparison feedback can have pared to a no-intervention control group.
different effects for relatively high- and low-energy consumers. households with higher energy consumption levels tend Combining These Fixes: Communicating
to reduce their consumption following comparative feedback. About Energy Conservation Using a
however, households with relatively low energy consumption Sociotechnical Approach
that receive comparison feedback have been found to increase this brief overview suggests that no one fix is likely to sucenergy consumption. this is presumably because the social ceed in solving energy-conservation challenges, yet a combined
comparison made it clear they had some room to move in com- approach offers a greater probability of success in the long
parison to other households. this suggests that it is important term. what we refer to as sociotechnical approaches can be
to carefully implement such interventions, as they may have very helpful when thinking about energy conservation intervendifferent effects for different energy consumers.
tions, including how to communicate about energy. For a start,
these and other findings suggest some paths forward. they take into account the communication that already goes
one of the ways to enhance the effectiveness of informa- on between the equipment and infrastructures that make up an
tion (and feedback) provision is through emphasizing social energy system; the people who derive energy services from the
norms about energy conservation. Social norms refer to system (everyone); and the people who contribute to its operawhat society expects of us, and when social norms are made tion, maintenance, and development. communication, in this
salient, they guide our behavior. a series of studies by rob- sense, is not just some optional extra in an energy system: it hapert cialdini and colleagues found that people litter more in pens all the time between things and things (automated sensing
littered environments and that people litter more when they and control), things and people (controls and interfaces), and
see somebody else littering. Both situations signal that litter- people and people at different scales. it is a necessary part of the
ing is the norm.
systems of technologies, habits, meanings, and knowledge that
if social norms guide our behavior, then social norms can lead to energy (and climate) outcomes. an appreciation of this
also be employed to encourage behavior change. there is now approach requires consideration of two main elements: who is
a wealth of research on the use of social norms as part of both communicating and what is being communicated.
information and feedback provision in the energy-consumption
domain. the assumption is that households will be motivated Who Communicates?
to make changes to energy consumption patterns when they Figure 2 illustrates some of the actors who communicate within
know that other people are also doing this. in one of these stud- a system for providing electricity to homes. it is a flat diagram,
ies, households in california received a message that either giving no indication of the relative power and influence of difemphasized monetary savings, social responsibility, environ- ferent actors, but it offers an indication of just how many indimental considerations, or social norms ("77% of San marcos vidual, organizational, human, and non-human elements it
residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool can take to make a system work, powered by traditional grid
in summer"). compared to the other
messages and a control group, households that had received social norm
information reduced electricity usage
Appliances
the most.
Regulatory
in other studies, social norms are
Designers
Bodies
made salient through a process called
social comparison. Social comparison refers to our tendency to compare
our own performance with that of other
Prosumers
Microgeneration
ICT
people. the effect of social comparison
has been tested in field experimental
settings: households receive inforThird-Party
mation or feedback about their
Installers,
Energy Service
own energy-consumption levels comEngineers
Companies
pared to other households (e.g., in
Metering and
the same neighborhood or the "most
Other
efficient" neighbors), and energy
Infrastructure
consumption is compared to a nointervention control group. a number
of large-scale randomized control figure 2. Communications between some actors in an electricity system.
january/february 2018

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