Shahzeen Attari: Human behavior and energy consumption: Understanding decisions about energy

Summary

In this insightful talk, Shahzeen Attari delves into the intricacies of human behavior related to energy consumption, highlighting the misconceptions people have about their energy use and the challenges of adopting energy-efficient practices. Attari outlines three key projects, emphasizing the need for better education on energy efficiency compared to curtailment. She also introduces the Tapestry Project, a collaboration aimed at providing real-time feedback on energy consumption to encourage behavior change. Throughout, she explores the balance between individual effort and systemic solutions, urging a shift towards more impactful actions.

Highlights

• Attari explores three projects focusing on perceptions and behaviors around energy consumption.🌍
• Misconceptions about energy efficiency versus curtailment are widespread among the public.🚫
• People tend to feel they've fulfilled their energy-saving duty too quickly and move on to other tasks.🏃
• Education and understanding of energy use can bridge the gap between perception and reality.🎓
• The Tapestry Project aims to provide real-time feedback on energy use to drive behavior change.⏱️

Key Takeaways

• People often overestimate the impact of simple actions like turning off lights and underestimate the energy consumption of larger appliances.🔋
• There is a misconception that turning off lights is the most effective energy conservation action, while experts recommend energy efficiency upgrades.💡
• Attari introduces the Tapestry Project, which uses real-time feedback to correct misconceptions and improve energy conservation behaviors.📊
• The study reveals that individuals prefer to perform easy tasks themselves and expect others to tackle more difficult energy-saving actions.🤷‍♀️
• Education and feedback on energy consumption can lead to more accurate perceptions and better energy-saving decisions.📚

Overview

Shahzeen Attari explores the fascinating relationship between human behavior and energy consumption, drawing attention to common misconceptions about how individuals can effectively save energy. She discusses three projects aimed at understanding and improving these behaviors. From the simple act of turning off lights to the complex dynamics of energy efficiency, the session highlights the need for more informed decision-making among consumers.

The presentation includes data-driven insights, showing how people often misperceive the energy usage of household appliances and the effectiveness of actions like turning off the lights versus adopting energy-efficient technologies. Attari emphasizes the importance of bridging the gap between perception and reality to foster better energy conservation habits.

Attari concludes by introducing the Tapestry Project, a groundbreaking initiative designed to give real-time feedback to consumers about their energy consumption. This collaborative effort with Jonathan Rose Companies and others is geared towards correcting misperceptions and encouraging more effective energy-saving behaviors, showcasing the potential of technology and research to drive positive environmental change.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Overview of Projects The chapter introduces the topics of human behavior and energy consumption, focusing on projects that explore how people interact with technology. The speaker intends to discuss a current project with Jonathan Rose Companies and outlines three main projects to be covered, all under the theme of understanding technological interactions.
• 01:00 - 02:30: People's Perceptions of Energy Consumption This chapter explores people's perceptions of energy consumption, focusing on how accurately they can identify effective energy conservation methods. It questions whether individuals would know the most effective actions they can personally take to conserve energy and what factors may influence their level of accuracy. The chapter also hints at discussing the ease of adopting these energy-saving behaviors and differentiates between individual aspirations and encouraged actions for effective energy conservation.
• 02:30 - 04:00: Understanding Accuracy of Energy Perception The chapter titled 'Understanding Accuracy of Energy Perception' covers three completed projects, focusing on people's perceptions of energy consumption. The first project involved an online survey conducted across seven metropolitan cities. This survey was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. The sampling was non-representative, as it was a sample of convenience. The discussion begins with the first question asked in the survey.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Predictors of Accuracy in Energy Perception The chapter explores public perceptions about effective energy conservation methods, highlighting that around 20% of participants believe that turning off lights is the most effective action. It mentions a diverse array of suggested strategies such as driving less, biking less, shutting off appliances, focusing on education, utilizing energy efficiency, and even increases in sleeping or relaxing more. The chapter points out the open-ended nature of the question posed to participants, emphasizing the variety of opinions and approaches to conserving energy.
• 06:00 - 07:30: Behavioral Challenges in Energy Conservation The chapter discusses two forms of behavioral challenges in energy conservation. The first is curtailment, which involves reducing the frequency of certain energy-consuming behaviors, such as turning off lights or driving less. The second is energy efficiency, which involves using products or appliances that consume less energy, like energy-efficient bulbs, appliances, or insulation.
• 07:30 - 09:30: Motivation Deficit in Energy Conservation This chapter discusses the concept of 'Motivation Deficit in Energy Conservation.' It highlights how many individuals, despite recommendations from energy experts to focus on energy efficiency, tend to lean towards curtailment (limiting usage) instead. This approach can be problematic due to the 'single action bias,' where people perform a few energy-saving actions and feel they've done enough, then shift focus to other issues like healthcare or groceries. The chapter emphasizes the need for strategies that encourage people not only to use energy-efficient devices but also to reduce overall energy consumption.
• 09:30 - 13:00: The Tapestry Project The chapter titled 'The Tapestry Project' begins by discussing initial findings related to the usage of devices for energy consumption. The first major discovery was related to user behavior with these devices. Following this, the focus shifts to examining the accuracy of people's perceptions regarding energy consumption. The chapter explores whether these perceptions correspond to the actual energy usage measured on an hour-to-hour basis. A log-log plot is used to illustrate the relationship between perceived and actual energy usage, with perceptions on the y-axis and actual energy usage on the x-axis.
• 13:00 - 16:00: Preliminary Findings from the Tapestry Project The chapter discusses the Tapestry Project, focusing on aligning perceptions with reality. It explains the challenge of conveying energy consumption in understandable terms to people who are not familiar with units like kilowatt-hours or watts. The researchers used a relatable example, comparing energy usage to a 100-watt light bulb left on for an hour, to help people estimate the energy consumption of various devices and appliances in their homes.
• 16:00 - 19:00: Conclusion and Future Directions The chapter discusses how people tend to correctly estimate the energy consumption of smaller devices like laptops and compact fluorescent bulbs, but significantly underestimate the consumption of larger energy users. The chapter includes examples, such as the common misconception that laptops use twice as much energy as they actually do, pointing to a general trend where people assume laptops use about 100 watt hours when, in fact, they average around 50 watt hours.

Shahzeen Attari: Human behavior and energy consumption: Understanding decisions about energy Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 i'm going to be talking to you today a little bit about human behavior and energy consumption talking to you a lot about some of the work i've done and also a project that we're we're doing right now with with jonathan rose companies um so the three projects i would like to sort of walk you through today is the first one is um and it's all sort of the the grand umbrella is understanding how people interact with technology in
• 00:30 - 01:00 nature so the first the first project is um what are people's perceptions of energy consumption if i were to ask you what is the single most effective thing you can do to conserve energy in your life would you be spot on how accurate are your perceptions of energy consumption and what are the factors that predict accuracy the second project i'll talk i'll walk you through is how easy is it for people to adopt some of these effective behaviors in their lives and then finally what i want to do versus what i want you guys to do
• 01:00 - 01:30 so those are the three projects um that which are already completed so the first one in terms of um people's perceptions of energy consumption this is work that was also published in the proceedings of national academies of sciences last year so this was an online survey that was uh advertised in seven metropolitan cities and all of the dots represent all of our participants so it's a not a it's not a nationally representative sample but it's a sample of convenience so the first question that we asked
• 01:30 - 02:00 people all right what is the single most effective thing you could do in your life to conserve energy so the top answer to almost 20 of our participants said turning off the lights so that's what i'm going to do in terms of what's most effective you have everything from conserving energy driving less biking less shutting off appliances education using energy efficiency sleeping more relaxing more and there's just no way i don't know how to do it so you have a whole range of these options and this was an open-ended question so
• 02:00 - 02:30 you could write in and this was right at the beginning of the survey so you could write in anything you wanted in the into this box so when you were and following from from karen's talk when you think about uh some of these behaviors you can actually think about them in two separate forms you have youth curtailment which is basically doing the same behavior but doing less of it so basically turning off the lights driving less or you have energy efficiency such as you know buying energy efficient bulbs energy efficient appliances hybrids insulating your home so a lot of energy
• 02:30 - 03:00 energy experts actually recommend energy efficiency however a lot of our participants thought about curtailment the reason why this is a little bit problematic is because um i might have limited amount of effort so i might do one or two behaviors and think that i've done my part so something like the single action bias and then sort of move on to the to the next problem such as healthcare or buying my groceries or picking up the kids so we really need to figure out how do you get people to not only get use the most energy efficient devices but also curtail the the use of how much they're
• 03:00 - 03:30 using their devices so this was sort of our first big finding the next thing that i wanted to do is i wanted to figure out all right how accurate are people's perceptions of energy consumption do they really match what is what is real out there in terms of how much energy these devices use on a hour-to-hour basis so on the y-axis here you're here you have uh perceptions of energy use and and know this is a log-log plot and on the x-axis you have the actual amount of energy used so so
• 03:30 - 04:00 if your perceptions match reality your data points would lie along this diagonal line does that make sense all right so what we also had to do is because uh a lot of people don't understand kilowatt hours or watts so we had to provide people with a reference point to sort of explain to them what we were sort of asking them about so what i what i what i what i told people is that all right assume that 100 watt light bulb being left on for one hour uses 100 units of energy how many units of energy would be used by these different devices and appliances in their home
• 04:00 - 04:30 so here's what the data looks like so what you notice is that for this for the smaller behaviors such as you know compact fluorescent bulb laptop desktop people roughly get those behaviors right but they significantly underestimate the large energy users so let me walk you through two separate examples so that this makes a little bit more sense so people overestimate laptops by a factor of two so they think that a laptop uses 100 watt hours but it actually uses roughly 50 and we're looking at averages of these devices
• 04:30 - 05:00 so you know people overestimate by a small factor but if you look at underestimation people actually underestimate dishwasher uses usage by a factor of 800 times so why is this again problematic is that if you again you know if you go up to people and say all right conserve energy use less energy in your home you might do some of these smaller behaviors and again feel like you've done your part rather than going after some of the big ticket items so what we really need to figure out is how do you hold on to this the end of this curve and pull it up towards the
• 05:00 - 05:30 diagonal line how do you sort of educate people in terms of how much energy is being used in their home so that's sort of one big policy recommendation that comes out of this work as well so in terms of what are the predictors of accuracy so we we looked at a lot of different demographic information you know gender age um a whole variety of different information to try to figure out who is it in the population that's more accurate so we had a lot of initial hypotheses but what we found was is that people who are
• 05:30 - 06:00 numerate so that people who understand quantitative numbers and people who have pro-environmental attitudes have more accurate perceptions which made sense you know for the most part but what we also found is that people who currently engage in some of these environmental behaviors they have worse perceptions of energy consumption so you would think that so you know a lot of people who already engage in these behaviors are automatically very educated but one hypothesis that we have for this finding is that i might be focusing in on the behaviors that i do and discounting the behaviors that i
• 06:00 - 06:30 don't do which leads to a warping effect in terms of my perceptions but that's a that's something we still have to test but there were a lot of things that were not significant like whether you own a car your political views gender age income a lot of those were not significant predictors of accuracy so then what we asked and this actually comes from paul stern's short list the one that the the sort of 17 behaviors of people uh that are recommended in terms of how what individuals can do to decrease their energy consumption we ask them
• 06:30 - 07:00 all right think about all of these behaviors and think about how how difficult or easy these behaviors are for you to do in your life not only think about the effort but think about the the amount of money you'd have to spend to implement these behaviors the cost the the effort the time think about all of these different factors and and rate each and every one of these behaviors on a scale from extremely easy to extremely hard each and every one of these behaviors and this is also a sample of 505 participants so what's the first thing you notice
• 07:00 - 07:30 the first thing you notice is that the whole somewhat hard very hard and extremely hard a blank so people don't find these behaviors extremely hard to do so the question is why aren't they doing them so if you think about um these two separate categories so if you think about all of these behaviors and you separate them out into two categories and what we can sort of uh do is label one of them very easy and the other one's somewhat easy what we should do is all right stop telling people to turn off the lights they've already got that picture stop
• 07:30 - 08:00 telling them to sort of replace one light bulb what we need to actually do is go after behaviors that save a larger percentage of energy and get them to adopt one or two of these behaviors and sort of lead them to an avalanche effect so that they start adopting more and more of these behaviors another interesting thing that comes out of this work is that you can imagine two behaviors that save the same amount of energy so tuning one's car and carpooling to work but people find carpooling to work way harder than tuning the car but this saves this almost uh the same amount of
• 08:00 - 08:30 energy so if we have a limited amount of effort let's go after the behaviors that people think are relatively easier to do so that they can actually adopt these behaviors and lead to lead to actual uh individual behavior change so there are these two separate models on on why people don't act and a lot of psychologists are sort of trying to figure out which which which of these two is it is it that people don't have the information so all right i don't know that's why i don't act so we just
• 08:30 - 09:00 need to inform them we just need to tell them what the right answer is and then they're just going to magically incorporate all of these actions or alternatively it's a motivation deficit model so it's not that people don't know but it's that they lack the particular motivators in order to act such as cost time effort social norms so the first piece that i showed you on on people's perceptions of energy consumption showed that people significantly underestimate energy use so that actually belongs sort of to the information deficit model so that also exists
• 09:00 - 09:30 but another piece now i'm going to show you is looks at the motivation deficit model so what we did in this piece is we again this was an online survey um done by mturk with 760 participants uh also sample of convenience but over here we asked people the same exact question that that i did previously what is the single most effective thing you could do in your life to conserve energy but then the follow-up question was what do you think americans can do in their lives to conserve energy so you would you would think that there would not be any systematic differences between these two answers alternative lights other
• 09:30 - 10:00 people should turn off the lights right so now let's look at the sort of the top three behaviors turn off the lights drive less public transit carpool bike biking walking and turn off appliances so what we can also do is group together turning off the lights and turning off appliances because they roughly mean the same thing right you're turning off something and compare that to driving less so this is what the 2x2 matrix is so let me just sort of walk you through this really quickly so 85 people said all right i'll turn off the lights i'll turn
• 10:00 - 10:30 off the appliances you turn off the appliances similarly 92 people said i'll drive less you drive less but what's really interesting over here is this asymmetry what this actually means is that all right i'll turn off the lights you drive less you car pool i don't want to do that so um the reason why this is really interesting is that if you if you think about these items in terms of effectiveness so what we did was we looked we asked another sample of people how easy or difficult are these um
• 10:30 - 11:00 are these behaviors for you to do and we and these are the the the these behaviors are the behaviors that were mentioned in the open-ended question so here's what it looks like the behavior such as turning off the lights and turning off the appliances are significantly easier than driving less for individuals so it actually is true that people want to do the easier thing for themselves and want others to do the hard thing so it's basically i want to free ride on your sacrifices so that's what that's so that's the sort of the motivational deficit model which
• 11:00 - 11:30 we also sort of have problems with that we need to address in our work so in terms of findings from work already completed a lot of people think curtailment rather than energy efficiency however experts such as gardner and stern recommend energy efficiency over curtailment so how do we get people to both buy the most energy efficient devices as well as curtail their behaviors people have small overestimates for low energy behaviors but they have significant underestimates for high energy behaviors so they have many implications for technology that we ex
• 11:30 - 12:00 that we heard about education and policy participants who are numerate and pro-environmental have accurate perceptions but people but participants that currently engage in some of these environmental behaviors have worse perceptions and one possible reason could be the focusing effect many people find these behaviors relatively easy to do so we need to actually figure out what are the significant barriers that prevent people from adopting these behaviors in their day-to-day lives and people list the easier behavior for
• 12:00 - 12:30 themselves and the harder behavior for other people so now let me sort of um so i sort of walked you through three separate projects that have already completed but now i'd like to walk you through a project that i'm currently doing um at cred which is trying to use real-time feedback to correct misperceptions of energy consumption and that's basically what we call the tapestry project now the tapestry project is sort of a three-way joint um uh project with jonathan rose companies uh think eco which is a startup uh energy technology group and cred which is the center for research and environmental decisions
• 12:30 - 13:00 so what is tapestry um tapestry is this beautiful green building in east harlem it's on 124th between second and third um and this is what the modlets look like so the modlets are these devices created by think eco which are basically um units that you put into every in in your home and they're designed to actually uh collect minute by minute device by device energy information from from your home so this is the sort of the plan that we
• 13:00 - 13:30 have for this um project so we've taken the whole building and we separated the building out into two groups one is the control group and one is the model it group what's really interesting about this building is that it's also mixed income so it has low middle and high income um occupants what we're really interested in looking at is that we we've already shown that people have major misperceptions of energy consumption so can we actually correct perceptions of energy consumption using real-time feedback once we correct people's perceptions how does behavior change follow follow along
• 13:30 - 14:00 what is the elasticity of consumption based on income groups so for example in terms of what i've already shown you if i'm low income i might be able to curtail my energy my energy consumption but i might not be able to make the initial capital investment to buy some of these you know expensive technologies that actually also decrease energy consumption however if i'm in the high income group i might want to do the complete opposite i might want to just use technology and use you know use the energy star small tv
• 14:00 - 14:30 as much as possible so that's one hypothesis that we have in terms of how curtailment and energy efficiency might might sort of um be different between these groups and also what type of feedback do people respond to so we've we've talked a lot about financial savings there's kilowatt hours which i don't think people understand there's acres of trees planted bulbs turned on so we need to sort of figure out what labeling strategy to use in order to get people to more easily understand energy consumption so this is sort of what we wanted to wanted to do with this project
• 14:30 - 15:00 so in terms of the timeline for the project so we've we've we've done a pre-survey which basically was a paper survey that that we actually did um asked participants and our occupants in the building to fill out and we provided them ten dollars for filling them out and troy simpson who's in the back actually helped with a lot of the data collection um right now the the models are being installed in the building and in a year's time we're also going to do the post survey which is basically designed to compare between so in this one year time did
• 15:00 - 15:30 people's perceptions of standby energy consumption improve or not did the attitudes change so living in a green building in itself is an intervention because you're living in a in the super green space as opposed to most of the other buildings that you might sort of walk into so how does living in the green building for the control group change their attitudes and how does living in the green building for the moderate group change their attitudes um these modlets are also designed to get at standby energy consumption so what is standby energy consumption so that's basically when a device is sort of in standby mode it's it's it's
• 15:30 - 16:00 waiting to get get information from you in order to sort of turn completely on so for example a cable box actually uses the same amount of energy when it's in standby mode as it is as it uses when it's in operation mode so these devices can actually completely curtail the amount of standby energy consumption a cable box uses by turning it off and then when you're using it turning the whole system on so that's what standby energy consumption is and this is sort of the project outline
• 16:00 - 16:30 so what we what we hope to do is again look at perceptions of standby energy consumption do people really understand how much energy is being used by a cable box when it's not actually technically in use um which groups buy the energy efficient appliances are there rebound effects of conservation um so for example if i if i actually use these modlets am i going to start driving more am i going to start using my computer a lot more and what's really interesting about this project is that we sort of monitor behavior change over this over the span
• 16:30 - 17:00 of a year or more so a lot of projects actually you know it's like an iphone i might i might get it i might pay a lot of attention to it but then sort of after a month or two i might just forget about it so that's called behavioral attenuation so with this we actually are able to figure out whether this behavior change is maintained over a long period of time if habit formation is actually occurred or not so in order just to wet your appetite i'm going to actually troy just collected the last pre-survey last week but
• 17:00 - 17:30 this is some preliminary very preliminary data analysis on the 129 uh surveys that we collected so we asked people how many of you would sort of use this energy monitoring device if it was free so a lot of people said yes i would love to use it 96 but if they'd have to pay for it only 73 would be would sort of want to use it and what they're willing to pay for an energy monitoring device for their whole home is roughly around 100 so that's important information for for people in in the monitoring realm so we know of what what roughly for this
• 17:30 - 18:00 particular group of people what their price point is a resident who want residents who want to get feedback they actually we ask them what type of feedback do you want to get and surprisingly especially especially given the discussion we just had they want their feedback in terms of dollars saved and they don't want their feedback in terms of comparisons to neighbors so if you ask people what what type of feedback do you want i want to know how much money i saved but they actually might just because because the price of energy is relatively low the the savings might not be enough in order
• 18:00 - 18:30 to uh sort of push behavior or change behavior that's why comparison to neighbors actually might be a better conduit for behavior change and another thing that we ask people is um all right what do you do with a cfl that's that's busted only two percent of the participants actually knew how to how to correctly dispose of the cfl so we have a lot of these different um questions that we sort of still need to analyze to try to figure out what is it that people know about in terms of living in a green building and what is it that they're willing to change
• 18:30 - 19:00 um so again just to wet your appetite um and hopefully we'll have more results to show you soon and with that i would sort of like to thank all of the great collaborators jonathan rose companies think eco cred carnegie mellon columbia and all of the great funding organizations that funded this work thank you so much for your attention you