Using social norm to promote energy conservation in a public building

In the last decade, there have been an increasing number of interventions that rely on social norms to leverage support for changes in behavior. Many of these interventions target environmentally relevant behaviors such as water and energy consumption, most commonly at the household level. In this paper, we present a field experiment that examines the impact of social norms on petition signing addressing energy consumption in a University campus building. Our results indicate that social norms have an impact on student’s support for the initiative, with 5% more students signing a petition to adjust the building’s thermostat by 2°F when informed that 90% of students initially agreed to sign the petition. Our research highlights that social norms can be used to influence individual behavior in a petition signing context, which is more likely to lead to permanent change, than those contexts where individuals need to repeatedly sustain these changes individually over time.