The power of social norms for reducing and shifting electricity use

New technologies are creating possibilities for making household energy consumption visible. With these technologies come opportunities for harnessing the power of social norms (viewed here as rules that are socially enforced) to affect energy consumption. But will those norms favor reductions in energy use? To answer this question, we conduct three online experiments with U.S. participants to assess individual values and normative expectations regarding household carbon emissions. We find that participants both value reducing carbon emissions and expect that others support reductions. The results have implications for non-monetary strategies for affecting household energy consumption. In particular, they suggest that it may be possible to harness the power of social norms not only to directly affect household electricity consumption, but also to shift time of use in ways that facilitate increased incorporation of renewable sources of electricity generation, and therefore a reduced carbon footprint for the grid.

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