Song of the Blog: Daft Punk – Face to Face

Like many of you, I share an office. There are three of us, and we each have our own preferences about office noise, lighting, and temperature. Navigating shared visual and auditory spaces can be tricky, particularly when we occupy them for so many hours over the course of time. While one officemate may prefer complete silence, I enjoy belting out Bob Dylan ballads whenever they randomly pop into my head. While I prefer the lights to be off at all times, normal people like to have the lights on from time to time, particularly when sunlight is weak.

Energy use in shared, public settings, such as offices, is difficult to manage in part because of these distinct preferences. Although you may not control everything in your office, such as the temperature or whether your office has windows, you do control other uses of energy. This includes the level of the lights, use of shades on the windows, use of computers and monitors, and other assorted sources of energy use. And there is often a social component to office energy use, as we can vary on whether we get along with our officemates, how comfortable we feel complaining about the shared energy use, and how we should go about confronting others over that energy use.

But, unnecessary energy use influences environmental and social issues like climate change. One way to improve our energy efficiency as a nation, and help mitigate climate change, is to improve how we use energy in our buildings, including our offices. There are a lot of ways to do this, but the energy decisions of employees are one piece to the puzzle. And with many offices being shared, this means we need to be more willing to discuss our energy use in constructive ways with our colleagues and supervisors.

In a past blog, I discussed how as a culture we could do a better job of discussing environmental issues with other people, and this certainly holds for our interactions with coworkers. We actually know very little about whether someone talks to their officemates about turning off unnecessary office lights, turning off unused computer monitors, or adjusting the thermostat to save energy. So, along with my colleague Drs. Xiaojing Xu, Chien-fei Chen, Bing Dong, and Julia Day, we recently examined who feels that it is easy to discuss saving energy in the office with their coworkers (published recently by Energy Research and Social Science; accepted version here). Guided by a model in psychology called the A-B-C model, or the Attitude-Behavior-Context model, our interdisciplinary research set out to ask how personal (e.g., someone’s attitude) and contextual (e.g., office norms) variables relate to one’s perceptions of how easy it is discuss energy use with coworkers.

Now, using the A-B-C model, people should find it easiest to discuss saving energy at work when they have the right attitude (e.g., they care about saving energy) AND they are in a context that supports saving energy (e.g., their company thinks it is important to save energy). So, we surveyed 245 employees from across the U.S. (from all types of industries and companies), and through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we found a number of interesting trends. We first asked who was willing to save energy at work. People who thought it was good to save energy, not too shockingly, were willing to save energy at work. They were also more willing to save energy when they did not believe that adjusting the thermostat would make them less productive. And even more so, people who did not think that personal comfort was closely linked to productivity were particularly willing to save energy when the context was right (i.e., the organization supported saving energy). This is similar to what the A-B-C model would suggest.

When did people find it easy to talk to their coworkers about saving energy? Here we found that believing your organization supports saving energy also predicted perceived ease of communication, as did believing that saving energy is good. But, we also found that people who believed it was good to save energy felt it was easy to talk to their coworkers about saving energy when they believed their coworkers approved of saving energy (i.e., a supportive group norm). So, the most likely time when an employee feels like it is easy to talk to their coworkers about saving energy is when that employee thinks it is good to save energy AND they think their coworkers also want to save energy. It makes those potential conversations a lot less awkward if you think your coworker is responsive and supportive.

Now, all of these measures were self-reported – we did not observe whether coworkers or the organization were actually supportive of saving energy. Nor were we able to record actual conversations employees had about saving energy. Future work can help provide many more details about these interactions. But for business owners or supervisors, these results do suggest a path forward for helping your employees save energy in the workplace. Emphasize that saving energy in the workplace is important, make sure people feel like their coworkers care about saving energy, and make it obvious that the organization as a whole prioritizes saving energy. This will not only make it more likely that employees as individuals will save energy, but they should also be more likely to recruit their coworkers to save energy in the office, potentially multiplying the effect of their own energy use decisions.

What do you think?

Song of the post: The Who – Join Together

Gathering scholars to discuss a common academic theme is almost certainly more difficult than herding cats. But, for folks who conduct research at the intersection of environmental issues and human behavior, the annual Sustainability Psychology Preconference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology has cast a wonderful net around the community for the past six years. As co-chair of the organizing committee with Cameron Brick (and with the help of the other awesome folks on the committee, pictured here), I wanted to provide a summary of the discussions from this year’s Sustainability Psychology Preconference.

We started off the morning with Dr. Linda Steg’s keynote address. Graciously traveling all the way from the Netherlands, Dr. Steg explored the importance of intrinsic motivation for understanding why people engage in positive environmental actions. For example, she detailed her recent research demonstrating that employees are more likely to perform pro-environmental behaviors in the workplace when they hold “biospheric values” (a relatively stable concern about nature). Furthermore, she explored how targeting egoistic values, such as concerns about money, may undermine the extent to which people engage in a range of environmental actions (e.g., save energy AND save water; sometimes called “behavior spillover”).

Following Dr. Steg’s keynote address, our first theme of the day focused on recent trends in the basic science surrounding environmental issues. Dr. Paul Thibodeau discussed systems thinking and the environment, revealing that people higher in systems thinking (e.g., endorsing statements such as “All the earth’s systems, from the climate to the economy, are interconnected”) are more likely to state that they feel connected to nature. Dr. Kathryn Doherty discussed how important it is that people who want to help address climate change need to feel like they, and their social groups, are efficacious, and that they can be part of future solutions. Finally, Dr. Matthew Hornsey used meta-analysis to explore the strongest predictors of whether people believe in human-caused climate change, finding that political affiliation (identifying as a Republican), those with weak environmental values, and those who felt that their local weather has not changed drastically in recent years, tended to be the most skeptical of human-caused climate change.

The second session of the day focused on the downstream implications of environmental behavior change. Specifically, these scholars examined how changing your environmental behavior (e.g., starting to conserve energy at home) can lead to engagement in additional behaviors (e.g., saving water at home; “behavior spillover”), can influence how people perceive you (e.g., stereotyping about your group membership), and can lead to positive health effects (e.g., more frequent physical activity). Dr. Heather Truelove discussed the current state of the research on environmental behavior spillover, offering thoughts on how scholars in this complex growing area can more consistently design and evaluate experimental studies. Dr. Janet Swim discussed her research that liberals tend to view people who are concerned about climate change positively, and this positive stereotype compels them to become more of a pro-climate change activist themselves. Meanwhile, conservatives tend to view people who are concerned about climate change negatively, and this negative stereotype compels them to become more of an anti-climate change activist. Finally, Dr. Barbara Brown  explored empirical evidence that “Complete Street” policies (e.g., building public transportation infrastructure, widening sidewalks and bike lanes) leads to not only increased use of more sustainable modes of transportation, but also increased physical activity and a decreased likelihood of obesity.

The final session of the day focused on the intersection of sustainability psychology and policy. Dr. Ezra Markowitz discussed how sustainability psychologists can inform environmental policy moving forward. In particular, he emphasized the need to build new collaborations with community partners, seek more creative research funding sources, and develop new programs of experimental community-based research. Next, Liza Meyer, Green Policy Manager of San Antonio, explored recent behavioral and environmental policies in San Antonio, including a coal tar ban, a ban on vehicle idling, and a green events ordinance. Finally, Molly Cox, President and CEO of SA2020, offered thoughts on the progress San Antonio has made on sustainability goals for 2020, and how SA2020 is informing sustainability goal-setting of cities across the world.

Apart from these themes, additional presenters offered brief talks on their recent work (“data blitz talks,” or brief five-minute presentations) or presented posters on their research. All of the invited and data blitz presenters, and many of the poster presenters, generously allowed us to share their presentation materials, which can all be accessed here. Finally, we presented the first ever student awards for the Sustainability Psychology Preconference for a Student Data Blitz Presentation and a Student Poster Presentation. Congratulations to Kimin Eom (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Jennifer Cole (University of Colorado Boulder) for the Data Blitz and Poster awards, respectively!

A huge thank you to all of the presenters, the committee members, SPSP, and San Antonio, not to mention Division 34 (Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology) of the American Psychology Association for funding support. We hope to see you next year in Atlanta, Georgia for the 7th annual Sustainability Psychology Preconference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology!