Towards understanding how redefining Supply Side Constraints could shape Individual Demand Side Behaviour

Abstract

The impact of behavioural aspects on environmental solutions has received more and more recognition over the last couple of years. There is a general change of thinking away from purely technical approaches towards integrated and holistic concepts, which take especially the end user into account.

Many studies have shown that technical improvements and innovations do not necessarily cause the desired outcomes due to a lack of communication with the actual end users of these technologies. Other studies, for instance on improvements of house insolation or the use of LED bulbs, caused paradox behaviour, sometimes also called “Jevon’s paradox” or “rebound effect”, where the technical improvements are eaten up by the increasing demand they caused. These are just a few examples to highlight the gap between new developments in environmental sustainable technologies and the actual behaviour towards these innovations from an end-user’s perspective.

The fundamental question therefore is: “How to influence people’s behaviour towards a more pro-environmental outcome, also in the long-term?” This paper will not be about another study, which proves incentives make people act in a more desired way, as long as the incentive is given. All the various aspects of human behaviour have been replicated in several well executed studies, however none of these on their own were able to solve the problem of motivating people to change their behaviour also in the long term. So instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again, the idea presented in this paper is to use well defined behavioural theories and their inventory tools, which have been well established in psychology and the social sciences, and to integrate them into a holistic cycle of behaviour using the High Performance Cycle and the Action-Regulation Theory as foundation. We will show how the integration of these behavioural theories can be used to devise support tools for better shaping demand side behaviour towards meeting supply side constraints.