1 Motivating Sustainable Behavior through Social Comparison on Online Social Visualization Catherine Grevet Wellesley College Jen Mankoff Carnegie Mellon University ABSTRACT Individuals could drastically reduce their carbon footprint by changing daily behaviors to more sustainable practices. In order for this change to occur, individuals must be made aware of their impact and must be provided with an incentive to change their consumption patterns. In this paper we provide a literature review of the current research in the areas of energy feedback, social psychology, and social visualization to determine functionality that is important in a computer-based feedback system to motivate users. Future work would include creating a visualization based on these findings. Author Keywords Social visualization, social comparison, sustainability INTRODUCTION In the United States, residents have complete control over a large portion of their energy consumption [12, 16]. By changing daily habits to more sustainable practices, individuals could greatly reduce their carbon impact [12, 13]. However there exists a general ignorance on the part of individuals to the fact that their actions directly impact the environment [7, 12]. In order to change behavior patterns, individuals must be made aware of their carbon footprint. Many studies have shown that individual feedback on energy usage is essential in increasing personal awareness on the ecological impact of daily actions [3, 7, 9, 15, 16]. Darby, in a thorough literature review of energy feedback systems, found that direct feedback, in the form of an interactive computer display, could contribute to reducing household energy consumption by twenty per cent [3]. Furthermore, individuals report being interested in receiving information about other households [4]. In fact, comparisons to other individuals could be a motivational stimulant [7]. Moreover, social comparison visually emphasizes the position of the individual within the collective by making individuals “gain understanding that [their] contribution is part of a larger picture: personal practices accumulate into collective practices” [7]. To create a carbon footprint awareness system that would show an individual’s performance compared to others, we must understand the different parameters of social comparison and study existing visualizations to see how social comparison has already been applied in other domains. There are different types of social comparison such as implicit and explicit comparisons, which result in different emotions [18]. This paper will present a preliminary map of the social comparison design space, and then the space will be completed with existing social visualizations. Finally, based on the exploration of these applications, we will describe the specific characteristics of our data that must be taken into consideration for the implementation of a carbon footprint comparative visualization on the Stepgreen.org website. SOCIAL COMPARISON DESIGN SPACE Social comparison is defined as “a phenomenon wherein people match their rate of performance to the rate of people working around them” [17]. Depending on different parameters of comparison such as group membership, relative performance, scale, explicitness, and anonymity, this phenomenon can make individuals motivated to adjust their behavior. In this section we present a preliminary map of the social comparison design space to understand how different parameters interact with one another. Group membership Many environmental social networks encourage users to form groups and to compete with other groups [24, 25]. In these situations, individuals could compare personal performance to other individuals in their group or to other individuals in other groups [19]. For the purpose of this paper, we assume that all the users of the visualization are members of a global group and we will focus on in-group comparisons.