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According to Associate Professor Dave Webb from the UWA Business School , most people don't respond well to being told what to do. So when it comes to reducing household energy use, governments face a difficult task.

In a new project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Associate Professor Webb, along with Winthrop Professors Tim Mazzarol, Geoffrey Soutar, and Jillian Sweeney from the UWA Business School, and Associate Professor Jasmine Henry from the UWA School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, will be aiming to persuade householders to reduce their energy usage. The study, titled ‘Enhancing sustainable energy saving behaviour through communication: A longitudinal study,' will be conducted over a two-year period. In undertaking the study, the UWA research team will be joined by Partner investigators from the WA Office of Energy, Synergy and the online research company pureprofile.

Energy Minister Peter Collier has welcomed the project. ‘This is an exciting project that will not only highlight the importance of energy efficiency but will also give us an understanding of people's attitudes when it comes to changing their behaviour,' he said.

‘It also complements a new campaign I have just launched, which will help empower Western Australians to take greater control of their energy use and make positive, long-term changes to their consumption patterns.'

The research team will be encouraging study participants to engage in intrinsically motivated, long-lasting energy saving behaviours through the use of online media. The study will recruit a panel of approximately 3,000 households within the Perth metropolitan area and track their energy use and attitudes towards energy conservation over two years.

The study will examine not only the impact of enhanced information and engagement on shaping people's attitudes and behaviours in relation to energy conservation, but also the effectiveness of online channels of communication and electronic word of mouth within the marketing mix. As Professor Webb notes, ‘The participants are not being controlled in any sense, so any decision that is made with respect to participating in the site is one that they're making of their own free will. Any behaviours that they are carrying out are because it is the right thing to do and they want to do it.'

Most previous attempts to reduce energy consumption have focused on providing financial incentives for householders, such as rebates for solar panels. However, says Professor Webb, this approach is only effective in the short term. ‘The idea of reward or punishment works in the short term as long as the promoting organisation continues to reward or to punish, and there's generally a higher cost to that,' he says. ‘If it takes a rebate to get someone to carry out a particular behaviour then you have got to continue giving out rebates. Far better would be to put that money upfront and try to shift behaviours towards those that are more intrinsically motivated.'

Intrinsic values, explains Professor Webb, stem from within and are founded on an internal values base. Behaviours motivated by intrinsic values are personally rewarding, as opposed to being premised on external rewards. As such, says Professor Webb, intrinsically motivated behaviour changes are far more effective than extrinsically motivated behaviour changes.

‘Twenty-five to thirty years of research has indicated very, very strongly across different types of behaviour that not only is intrinsically motivated behaviour positively related to increased wellbeing and quality of life, but also that intrinsically motivated behaviours are more likely to be sustained over a long time,' he says. ‘And when it comes to anything like environmental behaviours, the goal, of course, is to affect a behaviour change and for that behaviour change to be long-lasting.'

Self-determination can be broken into three components - autonomy, competence, and relatedness, where people are able to act as part of a bigger social cohort, which in this case is a broader energy conservation community. The intrinsic motivations the website inspires will vary but one motivation, suggests Professor Webb, could be the desire to share information and learn more about the topic.

It is a motivation to which Professor Webb can relate. ‘I've been interested in environmental and sustainability issues for quite awhile,' he says. ‘My old university in Wales was one of the main centres in the UK and Europe for environmental issues and I came out of that school. In 1997, I introduced the first environmental marketing unit course of study in Australian universities. Since then, I've done numerous research projects around environmental sustainability.'

The research team is multi-disciplined and includes Professors Mazzarol, Soutar and Sweeney, who have undertaken previous ARC funded research into the process of word of mouth as a marketing communications tool, and Professor Henry, who is co-ordinator of the Intelligently Designed Engineering for Advanced Living (IDEAL) House Project, which embraces the principles of comfortable but sustainable technologies.

Household energy consumption accounts for approximately 12 per cent of all energy use in Australia. In 2009, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimated that household energy use equated to 215 petajoules - or almost 60 billion kilowatt hours - with an estimated worth of $7.8 million per year.

The project will commence in 2011 and continue through to 2013.

Media references

Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]