Behavioral Approaches to Residential Energy Conservation CLIVE SELIGMAN, JOHN M. DARLEY and LAWRENCE J. BECKER Center for Environmental Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08540 (U.S.A.) (Received October 15, 1977) This article outlines some of the research conducted by social psychologists to reduce residential energy consumption. The results of two attitudinal surveys demonstrated that homeowners' summer electricity consump tion could be predicted from their energy-related attitudes. Personal comfort and health con- cerns were the best predictors o f consumption. Psychologically derived .techniques to reduce summer electricity consumption were experi- mentally examined in three separate studies. In study 1, almost daily consumption feed- back was found to reduce electricity usage 10.5%. In study 2, subjects receiving frequent feedback, who were also asked to adopt a difficult conservation goal, reduced their electricity consumption 13.0%. In study 3, a device that signaled homeowners when they could cool their houses without air condition- ing by opening their windows led to a reduc- tion in consumption of 15.7%. It was con- cluded that the resident can play an important role in energy conservation that complements engineering solutions. INTRODUCTION The social sciences, including psychology, have been far less involved than the physical and engineering sciences in efforts to conserve energy. As a consequence, much less is known about the human (as opposed to the technolo- gical) side of the energy crisis, even though it is people who make the decisions to use the machines that consume energy. Only recently have we begun to learn about how people perceive and respond to their "energy environ- ment" and how their attitudes and motiva- tions affect their energy consumption behav- ior. Nonetheless enough has been learned to indicate that people have an important role to play in any comprehensive energy conserva- tion plan. Three pieces of evidence collected by the Twin Rivers project [I] clearly show the importance of the human role in residential consumption. First, in a sample of 28 identical townhouses, variation in energy consumption was found to be as great as two to one [I]. Since these houses are identical in floor plan, position in the interior of a townhouse row, builder, construction materials, and climate, it is likely that most of the consumption variance is due to the different behavior of the people in the houses. Secondly, in houses where there has been a change in residents, it has been found that the energy consumption of the house with the new residents cannot be predicted from the energy consumption of the same house with the previous residents [2]. Thirdly, even after houses had been suc- cessfully retrofitted (with 20 - 25% savings), the variance in energy consumption among the houses remained almost the same as it was before the retrofits took place and the rank order hardly changed [3]. These results demonstrate quite convincing- ly that the energy consumption of a house cannot be completely understood without reference to the people in the house. In the remainder of this article, we will review the research that our group has conducted in ap- plying psychological theory and procedures to the problems of encouraging residential energy conservation. First, we shall discuss research aimed at finding the attitudinal determinants of residential energy consumption. Secondly, we will present several psychologically derived strategies to induce people to reduce their energy consumption and discuss the evidence we have collected bearing on the success of these strategies.