Abstract
Public estimates of energy use suffer from severe biases. Failure to correct these may hinder efforts to conserve energy and undermine support for evidence-based policies. Here we present a randomized online experiment that showed that home energy perceptions can be improved. We tested two simple, potentially scalable interventions: providing numerical information (in watt-hours) about extremes of energy use and providing an explicit heuristic that addressed a common misperception. Both succeeded in improving numerical estimates of energy use, but in different ways. Numerical information about extremes primarily improved the use of the watt-hours response scale, while the heuristic improved underlying understanding of relative energy use. As a result, only the heuristic significantly benefitted judgements about energy-conserving behaviours. Because understanding of energy use also predicted self-reported energy-conservation behaviour, belief in climate change, and support for climate policies, targeting energy misperceptions may have the potential to shape individual behaviour and national policy support.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by National Science Foundation grant no. SES-1658804 from Decision, Risk and Management Sciences; and in part by the Office of the Vice President of Research at Indiana University Bloomington through the Emerging Area of Research initiative, Learning: Brains, Machines and Children; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University; and a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. S.Z.A. is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. We thank all our survey participants and research assistants S. Watkins and D. Lundberg. We also thank B. Bergen, E. Brower and D. Miniard for feedback.
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S.Z.A. and D.L. designed the research. S.Z.A collected the data. T.M. analyzed the data. T.M., S.Z.A. and D.L. wrote the paper.
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Marghetis, T., Attari, S.Z. & Landy, D. Simple interventions can correct misperceptions of home energy use. Nat Energy 4, 874–881 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0467-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0467-2
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