IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2018 - 47

Although monetary incentives can be an effective means
to reduce carbon emissions by reducing household
fossil-energy use, they are often not cost-effective.

january/february 2018

Monetary Incentives May sometimes
strengthen Intrinsic Motivation
monetary incentives may not always crowd out intrinsic motivation. in some cases, monetary incentives may make people
aware of their intrinsic motivation to reduce household fossilenergy use or increase the salience of this motivation. For example, a study in the United States found that offering a monetary
incentive effectively promoted switching energy consumption
to off-peak periods. however, switching was independent of
the size of the monetary incentive. instead, switching depended
on the extent to which people felt morally obliged to shift their
energy use to off-peak periods. The extent to which people felt
morally obliged to switch energy use also did not depend on
the size of the monetary incentive. in this case, it may be that
the monetary incentive increased the salience of the morality
of energy consumption and thereby activated people's intrinsic motivation for the behavior. Possibly, when the government employs what is perceived to be a strong regulation, this
communicates that the targeted problem is indeed serious and
something a responsible citizen should be concerned about. it
has been suggested that such implicit communication from the
government can reinforce internalized motivation in the form
of a moral norm.
hence, it seems that monetary incentives do not always crowd
out intrinsic motivation to engage in sustainable energy behavior, but the reasons for this are not yet fully understood. more

Your Energy Consumption in kWh
Energy Use of
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motivated to adapt their behavior to be in line with others. For
example, when solar panels are installed in a neighborhood,
there tends to be a spur on solar panel adoption, independent of
income or population characteristics. moreover, the effect of
installed solar panels on other households' adoption is stronger the closer they are in terms of space and time and the more
the households therefore are exposed to this "information."
This example illustrates that sharing information about others'
adoption of an efficiency behavior can promote the behavior.
Social norms feedback on energy use has also been found to
reduce households' everyday energy consumption. When consumers learn from social norms feedback that they use more
energy than average, they tend to reduce their consumption.
however, this effect also goes the other way. When consumers learn that they use less energy than average, they tend to
increase their consumption. Possibly, when people learn that
they are low users, they feel justified to increase their comfort,
for example, by turning up the heater and taking longer showers
after all, their neighbors are doing it too.
To prevent negative effects on consumers using less than
average, it has been suggested that social norms feedback
about the energy consumption of others should be combined
with additional information about the socially desirable
behavior (see Figure 5). in one study, half of the consumers were provided with plain social norms feedback that
compared their own energy use to that of their neighbors.
The other half received the same feedback but additionally
received information about the socially desirable behavior in
the form of a smiley face when they used less and a frowned
face when they used more than their neighbors. The group
receiving both types of information saved the most energy,
suggesting that the smiley face led those who consumed less
than average to abstain from increasing their energy use to
be like their neighbors. based on these results, energy companies such as opower have implemented this type of social
norms feedback to motivate energy savings among their customers, which has reduced their average energy consumption
by about 2%, according to an independent evaluation.
hence, it is important that policy makers first test which
factors influence the behaviors they aim to change. based
on that evaluation, strategies should be developed that can
effectively reduce household fossil-energy use. There is
still a need for more research to systematically compare the
effectiveness of different strategies for reducing household
fossil-energy use as well as testing their effectiveness for
different types of behaviors.

figure 5. Social norms feedback comparing households'
energy consumption to the energy consumption of neighbors, with a smiley face conveying the socially desirable
behavior. (This figure was created based on data from P.W.
Schultz, J.M. Nolan, R.B. Cialdini, N.J. Goldstein, and V.
Griskevicius, "The constructive, destructive, and reconstructive power of social norms," Psychological Science,
vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 429-434, 2007.)
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