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Simple interventions can correct misperceptions of home energy use

Nature Energy volume 4, pages 874–881 (2019)Cite this article

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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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Fig. 1: Relation between actual and estimated energy use.
Fig. 2: Effects of explicit heuristic and scale-use information interventions on energy-use estimates of home appliances.
Fig. 3: Individual differences in understanding the appliances’ relative energy use.

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Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are available online: https://osf.io/2qbxt/

Code availability

The code to generate figures and results is available upon request.

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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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  1. Tyler Marghetis

    Present address: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Tyler Marghetis & Shahzeen Z. Attari

  2. Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Tyler Marghetis & David Landy

  3. Netflix, Los Gatos, CA, USA

    David Landy

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  2. Shahzeen Z. Attari
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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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Correspondence to Tyler Marghetis.

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Supplementary Notes 1–5, Tables 1–11, Figs. 1–3, methods and refs. 1–6.

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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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