Investigating the Role of Occupants, Complex Contextual Factors, and Norms on Residential Energy Consumption.

Abstract

Human behavior in the built environment has repeatedly been found to have significant meaningful impact on energy consumption. As a consequence researchers have spent considerable efforts investigating various approaches to induce improved occupant behavior, with much recent attention on the use of normative approaches. However, it still remains unclear as to how occupants behave in buildings, how complex factors influence behavioral interventions, and what the long term effects of intervening are. With this background in mind, there are three broad goals in this research: (1) to improve our understanding of the impact of occupant decision making in residential energy consumption, (2) to enhance our understanding of how individual characteristics and complex contextual factors influence change in individual behavior and its diffusion through communities when subjected to normative intervention, and (3) to identify more effective normative behavioral strategies for reducing energy consumption in the built environment. In order to achieve these diverse research objectives, I conducted four interrelated studies based on an iterative research framework that applies an interdisciplinary research approach integrating field experiments with computational modeling. Through these studies it was found that: (1) vast quantities of energy are spent in unoccupied residences and that the percentage of energy consumed while unoccupied in a residence is unrelated to total use; (2) when applying behavior interventions social network structure can meaningfully affect how behavior diffuses and intervention outcome; (3) normative messaging duration positively influenced the durability of behavior change; (4) not all individuals were equally influenced by normative messaging with high norm individuals reducing energy consumption and low norm individuals increasing consumption; (5) by exploiting behavioral responses to normative messaging significant reductions in energy consumption could conceptually be achieved. These findings improve our understanding of occupant behavior, how occupants are influenced by social forces in the built environment, and how complex contextual factors moderate the diffusion of behavior. Further, the findings provide insight into how to improve the environmental sustainability of buildings through behavioral approaches.