How do we know our environmental impact when the numbers describing it are invisible? Think about how many liters of water flowed from your shower this morning, the carbon emissions released by your neighborhood last week, or the air pollution lingering outside your street right now. Do you know those numbers? No. There is no mechanism that shows you this data — and this invisibleness — let’s face it — is not motivating us to change.

A few years ago I started to wonder, “What if our environmental impact was displayed to us on an iPad or a “Fitbit for the planet” that hung on the wall, and it updated in real-time? If we could simply see the numbers, this data must motivate us to change, right?”

I dug into the academic literature and I discovered professor John Petersen. He’s a systems ecologist from Oberlin College in Ohio and he’s published several papers showing the effect that environmental data (usually kilowatt-hours) has on people when it’s displayed on a digital screen that hangs on the wall.

His experiments that used display screens as part of an energy-saving competition have gotten some staggering results — even a 56 percent reduction in energy use. This is a big deal because studies show that other electricity feedback devices only get a three to eight percent improvement.

In a world where we struggle to get people to adopt eco-friendly habits, why was John’s approach so successful? I invited him to join us on our monthly Fitbit for the Planet video hangout where he shared twelve thoughtful and evidence-based insights about how to do it.

Listen to the full podcast episode with professor John Petersen here.

1. Show the quantitative effect of a person’s actions— it’s called “feedback”

Where does the idea of “feedback” comes from? For 50,000 years of history, humans were fully integrated with natural ecosystems. Our decisions were influenced by direct and intimate feedback we received from the natural world. Now, we spend ninety percent of our time indoors using modern technology. We’ve lost many of the feedback cues from nature that informed our ability to calibrate our impact — and that’s a fundamental limitation to our ability to address environmental problems.

The big quest now is to use technology to re-couple humans with the information about ecosystems around us, such as our carbon emissions. Regular folk might call this a “smart meter display” while researchers call it “eco-feedback,” “socio-technological feedback,” or just “feedback.” One of the easiest ways to implement feedback is to show the energy consumption of a building on a digital screen.

2. Make a digital screen on the wall — “In your face, in your space”

You need to embed the data into the environment so people see it everywhere — that’s why public digital displays are so powerful.

John uses the moniker “In your face, in your space” to drive the message that we need to insert these digital displays in places where people can’t avoid seeing them — such as hallways, kitchens, cars, elevators, and lobbies. It’s the only way to engage all citizens and not just “the already converted.”

This technique is called “Ambient feedback.” The influence of these “ambient” digital displays is fascinatingly unconscious. Evidence shows that people living with an ambient display of kilowatt-hours reduce their energy use, even if they don’t know they are saving energy — and even when they claim not to notice the screen at all. Petersen says, “People don’t think they are getting the information, but they are.”

3. Create a charismatic critter — an “empathetic character gauge”

One of the most impactful ways of communicating data isn’t using a chart or a number — it’s via the emotional expression of a cartoon animal. Energy use going up or going down can be displayed with a smile or a frown — they call it “empathetic character gauge.”

John’s project created a character called “Flash the Energy Squirrel” who is featured on the Environmental Dashboard displays. The squirrel radiates love-hearts and dances ecstatically when energy use is down. Flash looks crestfallen and scared when energy use goes up.

When tested against other infographic styles such as a needle gauge, a colored light, or simply displaying the kilowatts in numbers, Flash-the-empathetic-character-gauge got a better result and was more liked than all the other graphic styles.

Petersen describes the character as “being designed to pry open an emotional response and elicit empathy.” It works because it bypasses a person’s analytical thought process and strikes directly to their emotional center. This matters because it’s emotion that drives most human decision-making.

The team tested the effect of Flash the Energy Squirrel in schools and found that when energy use was high, kids at the school felt sad. The research team compared the kid’s reaction with other schools that had no Flash, and the squirrel-less kids showed no emotional response to the school’s energy consumption whatsoever.

4. Show the data in real-time

The cornerstone of the feedback concept is this — people can see the impact of their actions immediately — that means using data that is real-time. Putting a real-time feedback display in front of someone is like putting on glasses and seeing their impact clearly for the first time.

In John’s most successful experiment, he talks about radical measures that students took in response to being able to observe energy data that was previously invisible. Students unplugged vending machines and even dismantled the very display screen that showed the energy consumption that got them motivated in the first place!

5. Foster systems thinking — an individual as part of a whole

Petersen believes that we truly become empowered when we know how our individual footprint fits into our neighborhood, city, and nation’s impact. We need to show the impact of our city as a whole, or what he calls “community-scale feedback,” to get people to understand the importance of their actions on the community.

Think of your feedback as a technology that promotes systems thinking — a deeper sense of connectedness and belonging, that leads to action.

6. Show examples of pro-environmental action (social norms) and celebrate them

There’s an important term in psychology called “social norms.” It simply means “the thing that everyone else is doing.” It’s a big deal because one of the strongest drivers of human behavior is to imitate those around us. We copy people all the time.

John’s Environmental Dashboard project shows positive examples of action people are taking in the community. He wants to celebrate the environmental behaviors that people are already engaged in, taking an approach of trying to “ratcheting up” social norms to send the message “this is what our community does.”

7. Compare people’s performance to each other

Comparing the performance of two people to each other, or to a group average, is one of the most effective ways to get people to improve their score.

“I have come to believe that social norms are the key to behavior change. It’s making data comparative with others who you care about, or some sort of reference to you.”

8. Create a competition, and make it collaborative

Competition is a powerful tool, but it needs to be designed carefully. A competition that is designed for the bulk of people to “lose” and only a couple of people win, won’t motivate people — and it can even be disempowering.

In John’s experiments, his campus-wide competitions turned out to be disempowering because only a few campuses will succeed and fifty or more campuses will fail. He fixed this by creating competitions within campuses with smaller amounts of players. The goal was collaborative (i.e let’s all get our campus to reach its goal) while the competition was between dorms to get there. It’s competition as part of a larger collaborative context.

9. Give people an explicit goal

Give people a goal, a baseline, and a percentage you want them to change, such as “Your goal is to reduce your kilowatt-hours by thirty percent.” We introduced a goal to the onboarding slides of Energy Lollipop and asked our new users to cut their CO2 by fifty percent within six months.

10. Show energy data as CO2 (instead of kilowatts or dollars)

If you’re displaying electricity use, people are usually more motivated by CO2 than they are by kilowatt-hours or by dollars. A study I mention in my book, How to Save the World, tested two types of posters to see which one got people the save the most energy. One flyer mentioned CO2, the other, dollars. More people were responsive to the flyer that asked people to save energy because of CO2.

11. Get people to make a commitment or pledge

Most humans are deeply driven to keep a promise. Psychologists call this “commitment.” You can apply this phenomenon to eco-friendly behaviors by asking people to make a pledge. You might ask someone to write down “I commit to eating 100% plant-based on weekdays” or speak it on video, or wear it as a bracelet. Mechanisms like this to get people to pledge are called a “commitment device” or when it comes to a computer interface, a “commitment widget.”

“You can ask people what behaviors they do and then promote them publicly to reinforce their identity. Commitment leads to consistency — once you get someone to publicly commit, they will want to stick to it to remain consistent.”

12. Inspire mastery, not simplicity

We often hear that environmental behaviors need to be “simple and easy.” However, evidence suggests that people are more inclined to follow behaviors that are a little more complex.

It’s a bit like a game. Do we want to play a game that’s easy? Not really. It’s boring. We want an element of challenge.

We don’t need to over-simplify the action we want people to take. Instead, we need to inspire people with a captivating story to take on great challenges, such as in Kennedy’s famous speech when he declared “We go to the moon . . . not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

Positive action comes from inspirational stories about what has been done and what can be done – and we can use these stories to help people see themselves as part of a community that is moving forward.

Buildings are responsible for about one-third of all carbon emissions, and up to half of that is wasted by human carelessness.

Public displays of environmental feedback have the potential to make big immediate wins through behavior change alone. I have a hunch they will spur long-term innovation by activating a select group who will deeply engage with the numbers and take on the quest to make a bigger system-wide impact.

The craft of designing environmental feedback is only in its infancy. Who knows what kind of inspiration we could hatch in the community as we turn the invisible to visible.

Listen to the full podcast with Professor Petersen on the How to Save the World podcast here.

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