Does salience of neighbor-comparison information attract attention and conserve energy? Eye-tracking experiment and interview with korean local apartment residents

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether salience of neighbor comparison information attracts more attention from residents and consequently leads to significant energy conser-vation. An eye-tracking experiment on 54 residents in a local apartment complex in Korea found that the average time of attention to the neighbor comparison information increased to 277 ms when the size of the information was four times larger and the information was located to the far left. However, the interviews with the subjects suggest that salience of the information is seemingly un-related to energy conservation, because most of them did not agree with the social consensus that individuals need to refrain from consuming energy when they know that they have consumed more than the neighbor’s average. Utility data on 502 households in the apartments revealed that, of the households notified that they consumed more than their neighbors, only less than 50% reduced their energy consumption, which supports the interview results. Therefore, it was concluded that neighbor comparison information did not lead to significant energy conservation effects in the commu-nity, although salience of the information contributed to attracting more attention to the infor-mation. Unavailable household data remained as limitation to clarify the effect by households.