Caroline Leygue

Apportioning energy consumption in the workplace: a review of issues in using metering data to motivate staff to save energy

The UK government has set ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions, and lowering energy demand within workplaces is important to help meet these. With the rollout of smart metres and the availability of more fine-grained energy monitoring equipment for the workplace, it is increasingly possible to disaggregate collective energy consumption and apportion this among building users. This article presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the rationale and feasibility of different approaches to apportionment to motivate staff to reduce energy consumption. Our review indicates greatest potential for energy saving when consumption is apportioned to small to medium-sized groups, rather than individuals or entire buildings, particularly when they represent existing communities to which staff members strongly identify. We highlight the complexity of technical, psychological, social and organisational factors that not only inspire, but also often confound, efforts to innovate in this area.

Energy Sharing and Energy Feedback: Affective and Behavioral Reactions to Communal Energy Displays

Smart meters and energy displays are being rolled out in many countries to help individuals monitor and reduce their energy usage. However, to date there is little in depth understanding of how they may change behavior. While there is currently a great deal of technical research into developing smart metering, little research has been conducted on how this affects the energy user. This research addresses this gap and explores the user perspective of energy displays when energy is considered as a shared resource. We report an online experiment conducted across the UK examining affective and behavioral responses to energy sharing situations incorporating different types of energy displays. Reactions differed depending on the type of display. In a situation where one person used more than their fair share of energy, displays showing the average amount of usage in the house were associated with feelings of guilt and fear and a decrease in intention to use energy. Displays that identified the person who overused the resource were associated with anger, and direct sanction intentions on those who were overusing energy. Findings are discussed in terms of the smart meter rollout and the potential utility of detailed energy monitoring technologies for behavior change.

Personalizing the theme park: psychometric profiling and physiological monitoring

Theme parks are important and complex forms of entertainment, with a broad user-base, and with a substantial economic impact. In this paper, we present a case study of an existing theme park, and use this to motivate two research challenges in relation to user-modeling and personalization in this environment: developing recommender systems to support theme park visits, and developing rides that are personalized to the users who take part in them. We then provide an analysis, drawn from a real-world study on an existing ride, which illustrates the efficacy of psychometric profiling and physiological monitoring in relation to these challenges. We conclude by discussing further research work that could be carried out within the theme park, but motivate this research by considering the broader contribution to user-modeling issues that it could make. As such, we present the theme park as a microcosm which is amenable to research, but which is relevant in a much broader setting.

On implicit racial prejudice against infants

Because of the innocence and dependence of children, it would be reassuring to believe that implicit racial prejudice against out-group children is lower than implicit prejudice against out-group adults. Yet, prior research has not directly tested whether or not adults exhibit less spontaneous prejudice toward child targets than adult targets. Three studies addressed this issue, contrasting adults with very young child targets. Studies 1A and B revealed that participants belonging to an ethnic majority group (White Europeans) showed greater spontaneous favorability toward their ethnic in-group than toward an ethnic out-group (South Asians), and this prejudice emerged equally for infant and adult targets. Study 2 found that this pattern occurred even when race was not a salient dimension of categorization in the implicit measure. Thus, there was a robust preference for in-group children over out-group children, and there was no evidence that this prejudice is weaker than that exhibited toward adults.

Digital energy visualizations in the workplace: the e-Genie tool

ABSTRACT Building management systems are designed for energy managers; there are few energy-feedback systems designed to engage staff. A tool, known as e-Genie, was created with the purpose of engaging workplace occupants with energy data and supporting them to take action to reduce energy use. Building on research insights within the field, e-Genie’s novel approach encourages users to make plans to meet energy-saving goals, supports discussion and considers social energy behaviours (e.g. discussing energy issues, taking part in campaigns) as well as individual actions. A field-based study of e-Genie indicated that visualizations of energy data were engaging and that the discussion ‘Pinboard’ was particularly popular. Pre- and post-survey (N = 77) evaluation of users indicated that people were significantly more concerned about energy issues and reported engaging more in social energy behaviour after about two weeks of e-Genie being installed. Concurrently, objective measures of electricity use decreased over the same period, and continued decreasing over subsequent weeks. Indications are that occupant-facing energy-feedback visualizations can be successful in reducing energy use in the workplace; furthermore, supporting social energy behaviour in the workplace is likely to be a useful direction for promoting action.

Corrigendum: Guilty repair sustains cooperation, angry retaliation destroys it

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/srep46709.

Guilty repair sustains cooperation, angry retaliation destroys it

Sustained cooperative social interactions are key to successful outcomes in many real-world contexts (e.g., climate change and energy conservation). We explore the self-regulatory roles of anger and guilt, as well as prosocial or selfish social preferences in a repeated social dilemma game framed around shared electricity use at home. We explore the proposal that for sustained cooperation, guilty repair needs to override angry retaliation. We show that anger is damaging to cooperation as it leads to retaliation and an increase of defection, while, through guilt, cooperation is repaired resulting in higher levels of cooperation. We demonstrate a disconnect between the experience of anger and subsequent retaliation which is a function of participants’ social preferences. While there is no difference in reports of anger between prosocial and selfish individuals after finding out that others use more energy from the communal resource, prosocials are less likely to act on their anger and retaliate. Selfish individuals are motivated by anger to retaliate but not motivated by guilt to repair and contribute disproportionately to the breakdown of cooperation over repeated interactions. We suggest that guilt is a key emotion to appeal to when encouraging cooperation.