Making It Easier To Be Green: A Single Case Demonstration of the Effects of Computer Defaults To Conserve Energy in a University Computer Lab

Hirst, Jason M.; Reed, Derek D.; Kaplan, Brent A.; Miller, Jonathan R.

doi:10.1089/sus.2013.9827

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…Such green defaults have been found to effectively guide people's contributions to carbon offsetting programs (Araña & León, 2013), paper use (Egebark & Ekström, 2016), and choice of a renewable energy provider (Vetter & Kutzner, 2016). Green defaults have also been shown to support sustainability outside private homes by automatically switching computers in a university computer lab to stand-by (Hirst, Reed, Kaplan, & Miller, 2013), reducing the room temperature in offices (Brown, Johnstone, Haščič, Vong, & Barascud, 2013) and increasing the share of vegetables during lunch through pre-portioned bowls (Friis et al, 2017). Interestingly, whereas all of these studies have demonstrated the power of green defaults to guide environmentally friendly consumer behavior in the broadest sense, no research to date has assessed the impact of green defaults on sustainable shopping (e.g., buying organic food, beverages in bottles or recycled paper towels; but see Demarque, Charalambides, Hilton, & Waroquier, 2015, for the effect of norm-based nudges on sustainable shopping behavior).…”

Section: Seemingly Conflicting Assumptions Specifying the Interplaymentioning

confidence: 99%

How green defaults promote environmentally friendly decisions: Attitude‐conditional default acceptance but attitude‐unconditional effects on actual choices

Taube

Vetter

2019

J Applied Social Pyschol

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Defaults (i.e., options that become effective without an active choice) have been found to be powerful tools to influence decision‐making in a range of behavioral domains. However, seemingly conflicting assumptions have been expressed regarding the interplay of defaults with individual attitudes. Whereas some expect attitude‐conditional effects (i.e., a statistical default‐by‐attitude interaction), others assume an attitude‐unconditional effectiveness of defaults (i.e., statistically additive effects). Integrating both assumptions, we argue that the interplay of defaults and attitudes depends on what is considered a default effect. Specifically, whereas default acceptance is likely to be attitude‐conditional, we predicted that defaults and attitudes would add up in explaining people's actual choices. We tested these hypotheses in an online shopping scenario presenting environmentally friendly or conventional default products to 231 participants. Participants’ environmental attitude was assessed with the General Ecological Behavior scale and actual product choices were identified if participants rejected a given default product. In line with our hypotheses, default acceptance was predicted by a default‐by‐attitude interaction. In contrast, actual environmentally friendly product choices were found to be an additive function of defaults and participants’ environmental attitude. From an applied perspective, our findings suggest that defaults can readily be applied even in attitude‐heterogeneous target populations. Concurrently, however, our findings also speak of the importance of people's attitudes for understanding individual decision‐making.

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