Abstract
Recent studies on water demand management show that providing visual information on water usage along with social comparisons with neighbouring households resulted in more efficient water usage. However, social comparisons can be discomforting for participants, especially in the case of downward or negative evaluations. To avoid this, some studies promote the use of social identity, a social norm approach that avoids comparisons. Past studies using social comparison used infographics, whereas other study types have used only textual (non-graphic) information. Therefore, in this study, we created a visualisation of water usage to highlight the importance of water as a shared resource, that is, as a public good, and feedback over six months according to the participants’ water usage. A difference-in-difference analysis indicated that the feedback was marginally significant in decreasing water consumption immediately and continuously, especially for the middle and low use households, during the summer months, which is a period of perceived water shortage. From the questionnaire survey, we found that households felt that they determined their water usage based on their preference and were satisfied with the outcome.
Highlights
The demand-side management of both energy and water has recently attracted much attention [1,2,3]
While providing social comparison feedback, some studies have relied on numerical information such as individual and average household usage levels, [3,9,10] as well as their rankings among the participants of field experiments conducted in a nearby region [9,11]
This study proposes a visualisation of water usage information to highlight the importance of water as a resource shared by residents and observes the subsequent changes in consumption patterns
Summary
The demand-side management of both energy and water has recently attracted much attention [1,2,3]. Many studies have examined the potential for encouraging energy- and watersaving behaviours by sharing the household’s data, as well as peer usage data. This strategy of providing usage feedback via social comparison is more effective in changing water usage behaviours than educational or awareness campaigns [8]. In contexts other than water and energy, some researchers reported that the provision of peer information only by text messaging leads to socially undesirable behaviour in the case of low performers
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