Research traditions across the social sciences have explored the drivers of individual behavior and proposed different models of decision making. Four diverse perspectives are reviewed here: conventional and behavioral economics, technology adoption theory and attitude-based decision making, social and environmental psychology, and sociology. The individual decision models in these traditions differ axiomatically. Some are founded on informed rationality or psychological variables, and others emphasize physical or contextual factors from individual to social scales. Each perspective suggests particular lessons for designing interventions to change behavior. Throughout the review, these lessons are applied to decisions affecting residential energy use. Examples are drawn from both intuitive and reasoning-based types of decision as well as from a range of decision contexts that include capital investments in weatherization and repetitive behaviors such as appliance use. Areas of difference and similarity be...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.32.053006.141137

Models of Decision Making and Residential Energy Use

Developing more environmentally sustainable consumption and production systems depends upon consumers' willingness to engage in “greener” consumption behaviors. Research efforts have sought to identify, analyze, and understand the “green consumer.” Initial marketing and economics research, focusing on purchasing activities, has been complemented by research from fields such as industrial ecology and sociology, providing a more holistic picture of green consumption as a process. Much of the research has focused on areas with the greatest environmental impacts, namely peoples' homes and household management, their food choices and behaviors, and their transport behaviors for work, leisure, and travel. The emerging picture of green consumption is of a process that is strongly influenced by consumer values, norms, and habits, yet is highly complex, diverse, and context dependent. There are opportunities for future research that provides greater interdisciplinarity and challenges our assumptions and expectations about consumption and the nature of the consumer society.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-environ-032609-094328

Green Consumption: Behavior and Norms

The greatest contributor of CO2 emissions in the average American household is personal transportation. Because transportation is inherently a mobile activity, mobile devices are well suited to sense and provide feedback about these activities. In this paper, we explore the use of personal ambient displays on mobile phones to give users feedback about sensed and self-reported transportation behaviors. We first present results from a set of formative studies exploring our respondents' existing transportation routines, willingness to engage in and maintain green transportation behavior, and reactions to early mobile phone "green" application design concepts. We then describe the results of a 3-week field study (N=13) of the UbiGreen Transportation Display prototype, a mobile phone application that semi-automatically senses and reveals information about transportation behavior. Our contributions include a working system for semi-automatically tracking transit activity, a visual design capable of engaging users in the goal of increasing green transportation, and the results of our studies, which have implications for the design of future green applications.

/pdf/ubigreen-investigating-a-mobile-tool-for-tracking-and-511ydmc5gy.pdf

UbiGreen: investigating a mobile tool for tracking and supporting green transportation habits

https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/ecodriving-pub.pdf

Eco-driving: An overlooked climate change initiative

The carbon footprint of UK households 1990–2004: A socio-economically disaggregated, quasi-multi-regional input–output model

Consumer lifestyle approach to US energy use and the related CO2 emissions

Corrigendum to “Consumer lifestyles approach to US energy use and the related CO2 emissions”: [Energy Policy 33 (2005) 197–208]

The energy and carbon quantification of U.S. household consumption is an important research subject of the human dimension of global change. This paper studies how U.S. household consumption contributed to national and global energy use and related carbon emissions from 1997 to 2007. The results clearly reveal that (1) U.S. household consumption was a dominant driving force of energy use and related carbon emissions at both national and global scales during the study period; and (2) annual growth rates of energy use and carbon emissions of U.S. household consumption were much higher than official statistics indicated. This paper suggests that a consumption-based accounting framework, in an open consumptionoriented economy, could serve as an important alternative to the existing production-based energy and carbon accounting framework for better reporting, analyzing, and helping mitigate national and regional energy use and related carbon emissions.

/pdf/total-energy-use-and-related-co2-emissions-of-american-25icud71en.pdf

Shui Bin

Papers

Consumer lifestyle approach to US energy use and the related CO2 emissions

Corrigendum to “Consumer lifestyles approach to US energy use and the related CO2 emissions”: [Energy Policy 33 (2005) 197–208]

Total Energy Use and Related CO2 Emissions of American Household Consumption, 1997-2007