Culture, conformity, and carbon? A multi-country analysis of heating and cooling practices in office buildings

Abstract

This study investigates human-building interaction in office spaces across multiple countries including Brazil, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, the United States, and Taiwan. We analyze social-psychological, contextual, and demographic factors to explain crosscountry differences in adaptive thermal actions (i.e. cooling and heating behaviors) and conformity to the norms of sharing indoor environmental control features, an indicator of energy consumption. Specifically, personal adjustments such as putting on extra clothes are generally preferred over technological solutions such as adjusting thermostats in reaction to thermal discomfort. Social-psychological factors including attitudes, perceived behavioral control, injunctive norms, and perceived impact of indoor environmental quality on work productivity influence occupants' intention to conform to the norms of sharing environmental control features. Lastly, accessibility to environmental control features, office type, gender, and age are also important factors. These findings demonstrate the roles of social-psychological and certain contextual factors in occupants' interactions with building design as well as their behavior of sharing environmental control features, both of which 2 significantly influence building energy consumption, and thus, broader decarbonization.

The impacts of building characteristics, social psychological and cultural factors on indoor environment quality productivity belief

“…As for the leading factors influencing the indoor environment, are office layout design, such as open-plan or enclosed offices, influences occupants' perceptions, thermal comfort, IEQ satisfaction, productivity, and organizational well-being [11,22,39,40]. One school of thought argues that removing or creating "unbounded" offices can stimulate social interaction and collaboration [41].…”

“…Accessibility to IECs typically measures one's degree of actual control over building systemsfor example, whether the thermostat is adjustable or windows and electric lighting systems are operable. The level of accessibility to control is one of the most influential factors for user satisfaction, energy-saving and personal comfort due to its physical and psychological impacts [8,39,56]. Multiple studies report that control accessibility is positively associated with overall IEQ satisfaction [51,57,58], work performance or productivity [22,[59][60][61][62],…”

“…The effect of country differences on IEQ-productivity belief is also considered because scholars have identified the important link between cultural differences and sharing building IECs and IEQ perceptions (e.g. [39]). In the following section, we first address the theoretical framework that supports our proposed dimensions, followed by the discussion regarding the variables associated with each dimension.…”

“…The other factor is occupants' intention to conform to the group norms of sharing IECs. Scholars have demonstrated that group norms are positively related to occupants' conformity to the norms of sharing environmental control features in buildings [39]; here we include both group norms and conformity intention in the studied independent variables. Finally, this paper considers the influence of demographics such as country difference and gender as the fourth dimension.…”

“…A translation guideline protocol was developed and followed to ensure equivalence and coherence across languages. Semantic, conceptual, and normative equivalence of survey questions was guaranteed by re-translating and verifying survey questions back into English before finalizing translated versions, as outlined in the double translation process (DTP), one of the most adopted translation processes for survey questionnaires [39]. University mailing lists were used to distribute the survey.…”