Better rules for judging joules: Exploring how experts make decisions about household energy use

Abstract

Public understanding of home energy use is rife with biases and misunderstandings that can stymie the adoption of efficient technologies and conservation practices. Studying how energy experts make energy-related judgments can help design decision support tools to correct misperceptions held by novices. Here we conduct interviews with electrical engineers (n = 10), physicists (n = 10), and energy analysts (n = 10) to document expert judgments about energy use and to identify their cognitive shortcuts (heuristics) for household energy decision making. Performance on an energy estimation task confirmed that energy experts have more accurate estimates of home energy use than novices. We document 24 unique expert heuristics related to device functions, components, and observable cues used by experts while making energy-use judgments. A follow-up survey with the experts indicated that these expert heuristics are generally more accurate than novice heuristics. The library of heuristics created in this study can be useful additions to education programs designed to improve public energy literacy and decision making.