Residents' Perceptions of Behavioral Reference Groups for Personalized Normative Messaging Interventions

摘要

Reporting normative feedback to residential energy consumers has been found effective at reducing residential energy consumption. Upon receiving normative feedback households tend to modify their use to become in line with group norms. The effect of normative messages is partially moderated by how personally relevant normative reference groups are to the individual. Advanced energy metering technologies capture households' energy use patterns, making it possible to generate highly similar and relevant normative reference groups in a non-invasive manner. Unfortunately, it is not well understood how similar individuals are to other group members. It also remains unknown how much individuals identify with behavioral reference groups. Therefore, this research aims to investigate how households perceive behavioral reference groups used in normative comparisons. Survey questionnaires are collected from 2,008 participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is found that while households' behaviors are more similar when grouped based on energy use profiles than based on geographic proximity, they identify more closely with proximity-based groups. Also, members' group identification increases as individuals have higher similarity in energy use behaviors with other group members. This implies that enhancing the identity of profile-based behavioral reference groups will lead to an increase in norm adherence, and in turn reductions in household energy use.