Résultat de la recherche
Are consumers consistent in their sustainable behaviours? A longitudinal study on consistency and spillover
It is unclear whether knowledge about a customer’s current sustainable behaviours, such as their choice of lightbulbs or travel mode, allows us to predict the sustainable behaviours they will carry out in the future. We address this in a large longitudinal study (N = 2177) where participants provided self-reports on electricity-, heating- and mobility related consumption at two separate times, three years apart. The results highlighted a high level of temporal consistency, whereby carrying out one sustainable behaviour predicted consumers would be carrying out the same behaviour three years later. However, sustainable behaviours generally did not drive other different sustainable behaviours years later (i.e. no spillover). In fact, isolated instances of spillover emerged only between different kinds of mobility-related consumption among consumers with high environmental values. Overall, the findings indicate a high degree of consistency in sustainable behaviour even years apart, and limited spillover from one sustainable behaviour to another.
When saving the planet is worth more than avoiding destruction. The importance of message framing when speaking to egoistic individuals
This paper sheds light on the reasons why conventional messages prove largely ineffective at fostering pro-environmental behaviors among individuals with high egoistic values. We conducted three experiments comparing the effectiveness of prevention-focused and promotion-focused messages at promoting pro-environmental behaviors. We found that egoistic individuals exposed to prevention-focused messages tended to perceive pro-environmental efforts as less worthy, compared to those exposed to promotion-focused messages. This effect, in turn, decreased their willingness to take environmental action. We also observed that the negative effect prevention-focused messages have on egoists is attributable to a defense mechanism. Egoistic people exposed to prevention-focused messages seem to deny the veracity of the message, which in turn decreases the perceived worthiness of the environmental effort and thus the intention to act. The findings highlight the best way to frame environmental communication to reach those who are least likely to adopt eco-responsible behavior, i.e., egoistic people.
Framing products and online services as “Automated” influences consumers’ preference for sustainable options
Feedback devices help only environmentally concerned people act pro-environmentally over time
Technological advancements spawn products that tend to be useful when placed in the appropriate hands. Here we investigated whether potential benefits of owning a feedback device were driven by individual differences in environmental values (i.e. biospherism), or whether the device alone is sufficient to reduce energy over time. We examined a total of 276 households, 138 equipped with a feedback device formed our treatment group, and 138 control households selected from a wider pool of households (+2000) based on their similarity to the treatment households, according to a statistical matching procedure. The results indicated that individuals with low biospheric values fail to decrease their electricity expenditure when paired with a feedback device. Conversely, highly biospheric individuals do engage in more pro-environmental behaviour when they receive feedback, but only when they have owned the device for about three years or more. We obtained additional insights, by focusing on differences within the treatment group that suggest, once again, that only highly biospheric individuals who owned the device for over three years successfully implement changes in the household. Overall, these results indicate that feedback devices such as smart meters can be important tools in achieving energy reductions only when paired with environmentally concerned individuals. Given the current trend towards increased feedback technology, policy implications for decision makers are discussed.
Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS): Objectives, design, and implementation
The Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the research agenda of the Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society, and Transition (SCCER CREST). It is designed to collect a comprehensive description of the Swiss households’ energy-related behaviors, their longitudinal changes and the existing potentials for future energy demand reduction. The survey has been planned in five annual waves thus generating a rolling panel dataset of 5,000 respondents per wave. The first two waves of SHEDS were fielded in April 2016 and April-May 2017. This paper elaborates on SHEDS's general objectives, design, and implementation. It also reports a series of practical examples of how the datasets are being used in empirical analyses.
Applied Sectors for Psychologists
Invited to give an annual talk on "Applied Sectors for Psychologists" aimed at inspiring psychology Masters students on how they can make use of their psychology knowledge to help solve concrete world problems as part of governmental projects or within business.
The spread of presaccadic attention depends on the spatial configuration of the visual scene
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared toward a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused on the immediate surround of the visible target and spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the distance from the cue and the delay between the target’s disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was not accompanied with a spread of the saccade endpoint. These results suggest that presaccadic attention and saccade programming are two distinct processes that can be dissociated as a function of their interaction with the spatial configuration of the visual scene.
Just before eye movement execution: the link between processing of visual objects and allocation of attention
Our visual system is fovea-heavy, which means that in-depth processing occurs only in the centre of the retina, forcing the eyes to make constant movements in order to bring visual elements into focus. Despite this, eye movements go largely unnoticed and the environment is perceived as visually stable. Pre-saccadic shifts of attention might be guaranteeing this stability by easing the transition from one foveated image to another. Before an eye movement attention shifts to the location where the eyes will land and visual elements presented there are preferentially processed. A similar mechanism, also based on the allocation of attention in eye-centred coordinates, is known as remapping. It allows attention to be maintained on locations of interest across eye movements, while accounting for the retinal displacement caused by each upcoming movement. In the current thesis, we are concerned with how the visual elements present in the environment shape the allocation of attention before eye movements. We first aimed to determine whether pre-saccadic shifts of attention are a precondition of all saccades, irrespective of goals. We showed that whether the saccade was goal-directed, to the intended target, or involuntary, erroneously directed to a capturing distractor, made little difference to the pre-saccadic shift of attention. Retinal displacement cause by involuntary saccades was also accounted for by the visual system. Next the project focused on how the presented visual elements affect the programming of eye movements, by investigating how the decision to make an eye movement is affected by the number of target alternatives. We saw evidence that a larger set-size can reduce saccadic reaction times without increasing the error rate, a finding not predicted by a popular model. Further, whether the presence of visual elements in and around the saccade landing point influences the shifts of attention was investigated. We demonstrate that objects and their arrangement shape the distribution of attention, and that the effect is not driven by saccade metrics alone. Finally, we look at the spatial and temporal distribution of visual attention when a saccade target is removed shortly before the eye movement.