Republicans don’t respond to “community norms”-based conservation messages
Interesting. A lot of us in the conservation community have been saying, “If we only told people how much [water, electricity, scarce commodity] they use by giving them smart meters and more informative bills, they’d come to their senses and start using less.”
Apparently, that can backfire if your customers are Republicans. From E&E News Climatewire (subscription required):
Political ideology helps determine whether homeowners respond to voluntary energy conservation programs, two University of California, Los Angeles, economists have found.
In a study published last month on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn concluded that providing feedback on energy use can actually backfire with some conservatives.
Costa and Kahn merged utility data from 80,000 homes with corresponding voter registration and donation records. The economists found that a Democratic household with green bona fides — paying for electricity from renewable sources, donating to environmental groups and living in a neighborhood of fellow liberals — will reduce its consumption by 3 percent in response to feedback.
Meanwhile, a Republican household that doesn’t adhere to environmental behaviors will actually increase its consumption by 1 percent. The households that received home energy reports reduced their consumption by about 2 percent overall, but the Republican subset of this group reduced their energy use by 0.4 percent.
About half of the homeowners in the study received home energy reports from OPOWER, a company that contracts with utilities to compare homeowners’ energy use with that of neighboring homes of comparable size. Homeowners earn smiley faces if they use less energy than their neighbors. The reports also suggest efficiency improvements, such as installing solar panels or cleaning air conditioner filters.
One question is: what’s “conservative” about over-consumption? Someone needs to spend time with a dictionary here. But I think that the bigger story is that we can’t just suppose things work—we have to formulate hypotheses and then test them. In other words, when it comes to trying to nudge people towards more desirable behaviors, our actions need to be based on evidence.
I wonder how many millions have been spent by public agencies to print advertisements telling people to turn off their lights or take shorter showers. Seriously, has anyone tested whether these messages work? You’d better believe that by the time Coca-Cola or Volvo launch an ad campaign it has been thoroughly tested with focus groups, and that it produces the desired emotional trigger.