Promoting Energy-Efficient Behavior by Depicting Social Norms in a Recommender Interface

Alain Starke,Martijn Willemsen,Chris Snijders

doi:10.1145/3460005

Abstract

How can recommender interfaces help users to adopt new behaviors? In the behavioral change literature, social norms and other nudges are studied to understand how people can be convinced to take action (e.g., towel re-use is boosted when stating that “75% of hotel guests” do so), but most of these nudges are not personalized. In contrast, recommender systems know what to recommend in a personalized way, but not much human-computer interaction ( HCI ) research has considered how personalized advice should be presented to help users to change their current habits. We examine the value of depicting normative messages (e.g., “75% of users do X”), based on actual user data, in a personalized energy recommender interface called “Saving Aid.” In a study among 207 smart thermostat owners, we compared three different normative explanations (“Global.” “Similar,” and “Experienced” norm rates) to a non-social baseline (“kWh savings”). Although none of the norms increased the total number of chosen measures directly, we show that depicting high peer adoption rates alongside energy-saving measures increased the likelihood that they would be chosen from a list of recommendations. In addition, we show that depicting social norms positively affects a user’s evaluation of a recommender interface.

Highlights

Recommender interfaces seek to present content that fits user preferences [29]
We investigated to what extent social norms affected user choices and evaluation of an attitudetailored list of energy-saving measures, compared with our kWh savings baseline
We found that the use of descriptive norms did not persuade users to choose more energy-saving measures in total, compared to our kWh savings baseline

Summary

Introduction

Recommender interfaces seek to present content that fits user preferences [29] In doing so, they can explain why certain items are presented [10, 58], for example, by highlighting that other users have bought a certain product. A good example is the work of Goldstein et al [25], who persuaded tenants of hotel rooms to re-use their towel by highlighting that “75% of others guests have done so,” instead of emphasizing the environmental benefits of doing so. Such descriptive social norms have yet to be tested for a larger set of energy-saving measures. Our aim is to analyze whether we can use social comparisons to create a majority norm that can promote “unpopular but useful” energy-saving measures [25, 44]

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Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion