Social Comparison as a Tool to Promote Residential Water Conservation

Abstract

Many regions around the world experience both chronic and intermittent needs for residents to reduce their water consumption. Recent advances in water metering infrastructure offer opportunities to provide customers with detailed feedback about their consumption, but research in behavioral science suggests that feedback by itself is not enough to motivate conservation. The current empirical work builds on previous studies showing the ability of an augmented feedback approach to promote reductions in residential water consumption, and extends previous research by exploring the variability in responses to this feedback. A sample of Sacramento customers was provided with printed home water reports in which they could see their household water consumption compared with similar homes in their area. The results showed that households that received the report used 8.35% less water in the subsequent 6 months than did similar households that did not receive the printed reports. Additional analyses showed that the effect was particularly strong for high-consuming households, and that the discrepancy between household consumption and similar homes influenced the amount of water savings.

Referent group specificity: Optimizing normative feedback to increase residential recycling

“…Our results were not supportive of this hypothesis, suggesting that there was no difference in the amount of change for different referent group comparisons at different levels below the norm. This was inconsistent with research showing this hypothesized effect for water conservation and energy use intentions and their difference for very high consumers (Bergquist & Nilsson, 2018;Schultz, 2019). However, this is one of the first studies to test the differences in the specificity of the norm referent group so comparisons to previous literature should be interpreted with caution.…”

“…In addition to the need for research testing the relative impact of different referent groups, it is also important to examine the behavioral response of individuals with varying levels of deviation from the norm. Prior research has shown a differential pattern of responses for individuals who are above or below the referent group norm in both energy and water conservation (Schultz, 2019;Schultz et al, 2008). Bergquist and Nilsson (2018) hypothesized a 'norm distancing effect', which suggests that people are more likely to adjust their behavior to conform to the norm if the discrepancy between the two is small.…”

Feedback to Minimize Household Waste a Field Experiment in The Netherlands

“…For example, the number of waste bags you produced during a certain period compared to the number of waste bags your neighbours on average produced during the same period. Numerous studies have shown that social comparison feedback promotes pro-environmental behaviour, for example, energy conservation [23][24][25][26][27][28], water conservation in households [29][30][31], and food waste recycling [32]. Research also suggests that social comparison feedback promotes waste recycling and reduces sorting errors, compared to general persuasive information [17].…”

“…Research also suggests that social comparison feedback promotes waste recycling and reduces sorting errors, compared to general persuasive information [17]. However, a study found that social comparison feedback did not reduce water and energy consumption [31]. The authors suggested that the comparative others should be socially meaningful to the participants (i.e., a pre-existing social group or similar others).…”

“…Future research could test the influence of social comparison feedback on descriptive social norms and injunctive social norms. It has been suggested that social comparison feedback is more effective when the comparison group is socially meaningful [31]. Therefore, future research could also test if social comparison feedback is more effective when the feedback is adapted to the type of household.…”