How Social Norms Messaging Reduced Energy Usage by up to 1.72 kWh/Day

Injunctive norm: How one “ought to” feel or react to a situation.

Descriptive norm: How people actually feel or react to a situation.

Boomerang Effect: When an attempt to influence a recipient towards a certain behavior results in them adopting the opposite behavior.

Social norms

In the past few decades, research on social norms has been encouraging, as a surprising number of articles have shown that social norms significantly alter behaviors. As such, social norms marketing campaigns have captured the attention of organizations that want to capitalize upon two consistent findings: 

1. The “majority of individuals overestimate the prevalence of many undesirable behaviors… in peers” 

2. Individuals use their perceptions of peer norms as a standard against which to compare their own behaviors.”¹ 

As of 2002, nearly half of the 746 U.S. universities surveyed by the Harvard School of Public Health used these social norms to combat binge drinking.¹

Boomerang effect

Despite these positive results, social norm campaigns can have mixed results. Some studies found that using social norms increases undesirable behavior, as normative messages make people compare themselves to the normative behavior and deviate from it. This describes, in essence, the boomerang effect. According to the focus theory of normative conduct, the injunctive norm is a second norm that might remedy this since it refers to perceptions of what’s acceptable within a culture. (Descriptive norms, on the other hand, refer to what is commonly done.) The research team thus decided to investigate whether the injunctive norm influences how much energy people use over ten weeks.

Participant selection and baseline establishment

Choosing from three census-block groups, researchers identified participants in 290 households in San Marcos, CA. Importantly, all participants had visible energy meters. Before any interventions occurred, trained research assistants measured these electricity meters twice during a two-week period. Comparing the two readings, investigators established a baseline usage measure for each household. 

Gathering data points

After gathering these baseline readings, households were randomly assigned to either the descriptive-norm-only condition or the descriptive-plus-injunctive-information condition. The researchers then used the baseline readings to create descriptive normative feedback and establish whether each household was above or below the mean energy usage. After the third reading, which occurred two weeks later, researchers left notes on the door of each home. The notes detailed energy usage compared to the baseline. 

One week following this third reading, researchers took a fourth reading and gave out a second note. This note contained descriptive normative feedback about the energy expenditure between the second baseline reading and the distribution laid out on the first note. Research assistants took a fourth reading while passing out the second note, and a final reading three weeks later. 

What’s in the messages?

The investigative team left two messages in total over this period. Each note contained:

1. How much energy the household had used since the last reading
2. How much energy a household in their neighborhood uses on average during this time period (Descriptive normative information)
3. Ideas for how to reduce energy consumption

Both conditions received messages with this information, however the descriptive + injunctive information condition also received a positively or negatively valenced emoji (a smiley or frowny face) depending on whether they were above or below the mean, respectively.

The MINDSPACE framework

Thus far, we have seen that norms, messages, and emotional associations have been used to enact behavioral change. Formalizing this, the researchers used the MINDSPACE Framework, a behavioral science framework designed to list the nine factors that most influence our actions. The MINDSPACE acronym stands for:

1. Messenger - Behavior is influenced by who is conveying the message.
2. Incentives - Incentives, for example “buy one get one free,” have been shown to induce behavior.
3. Norms - What others do can influence how we react in the same situations.
4. Defaults - We typically resort to the pre-set option, such as plastic grocery bags instead of paper.
5. Salience - Novel or noticeable things, such as a smiley face on a door hanger, draws our attention.
6. Priming - Subconscious cues, even such things as color or temperature, can effect the decisions we make.
7. Affect - Our emotions have a significant influence on our behavior.
8. Commitments - Generally, we want to keep our promises and reciprocate what’s been done to us.
9. Ego - We try to behave in ways that improve how we see ourselves.²

For those above average in energy usage, their weekly rate went down in both conditions. In the short term, the energy usage of those in the descriptive condition went down by 1.22 Kwh/hr. In the long-term, energy usage remained below what it had been initially (down 1.03 kWh/hr). However, a more significant decrease was measured in the group that received the descriptive and injunctive message. There was a 1.72 kWh/hr reduction in the short term, which remained significant in the long term at 1.23 kWh/hr.

Results differed for those below the average energy usage level. In both the short- and long-term, energy usage of the households who received the descriptive and injunctive message remained about the same throughout (0.24 increase and 0.1 increase respectively). However, families who received the descriptive message signficantly increased their usage. In the short-term, they consumed 0.89 kWh/hr more. In the long-term, they used even more than that, tallying at a significant 0.98 kWh/hr. These findings, though initially surprising, support the previous research that stated that descriptive norms can produce the boomerang effect. Moreover, results from the injunctive-plus-descriptive message groups “illustrat[e] the reconstructive power of normative information when an injunctive element is added to the descriptive normative feedback.”¹

• Less energy expenditure benefits everyone and the environment
• No demographic or sociological information was given, so it’s hard to draw broader conclusions
• There was no control group from which to draw comparisons

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