Encouraging energy conservation at work: A field study testing social norm feedback and awareness of monitoring

Highlights: • Energy comparisons to peers resulted in significant energy savings from baseline. • Awareness of energy use ("Hawthorne Effect") did not result in energy savings. • Energy comparisons to peers encouraged participants to learn about their energy use. • Energy savings achieved with no financial incentives or intrinsic motivation. -- Abstract: The financial cost of personal energy consumption is substantial at the organizational level. Rarely do incentives for saving energy for the individual employee and organization align, making conservation a challenge. Here we perform a 12-week field experiment piloting two behavioral strategies: (1) social norms feedback and (2) awareness of energy monitoring, to encourage savings among 46 administrative staff at a university who were given the impression of participating in an energy quality study to reduce self-selection bias. Those in the social norms feedback condition used significantly less energy during the intervention (10% less energy) and follow up monitoring (11% less energy) phases compared to their baseline consumption. Moreover, these participants demonstrated that they learned more about their energy use than did those in the awareness monitoring condition. For policy makers and building mangers interested in the effectiveness of behavioral nudges in inducing energy savings, social norms feedback appears to be an effective energy savings nudge in an organizational setting where there are neither financial savings at-stake nor intrinsic motivation to conserve.