What would it take to get people to drive less? It could be as simple as having them keep a record of the car trips they don’t take, a study found.
In the study, students at the University of Virginia who kept track online of the car trips they avoided ended up driving less than those who didn’t keep a record, researchers found. What’s more, students who also received feedback on both the money they saved on gas and the pollution they prevented by not using their cars reduced time behind the wheel even more.
“Monitoring your behavior can work to reduce your energy consumption, and if you have multiple kinds of feedback that can reduce it even further,” says Jesse Graham, one of the three authors of the study, published last year in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Companies hope to use behavioral-modification techniques gleaned from psychology to influence how people use energy. Conservation start-ups such as Tendril Inc. and People Power Co. have hired behavioral scientists to help them figure out how to motivate people to better manage their daily electricity usage. Car makers, meanwhile, are adding energy monitors and feedback about driving patterns in an effort to get people to drive more efficiently.
During the study that Dr. Graham, of the University of Southern California, co-wrote with Minkyung Koo, of the University of Illinois, and Timothy Wilson, of the University of Virginia, 128 college students sent in readings from their odometers. Over the next two weeks, one group entered in an online spreadsheet every time they decided to avoid the car and instead walk, ride a bike, take public transport, carpool or just stay home.
Several people in the tracking group then received information about the amount of money they saved based on their cars’ gas mileage. Others found out how much pollution they prevented, and still others got both types of information. One subgroup got no extra feedback at all. At the end of the study everyone estimated whether in the previous two weeks they drove less than usual, the same or more.
Researchers averaged the number of miles avoided in the different groups, and found that those who received both monetary and pollution information about their choices drove on average about 86 miles less than they had originally intended. Those who just recorded the trips they avoided drove 34 miles less. The groups that received just one type of feedback—about either money or pollution—drove about 48 miles less, but those improvements weren’t statistically significant compared with the group that tracked trips but received no other feedback.
The findings suggest that “people have multiple reasons for wanting to do a behavior,” says Mr. Graham, so if you want to change how you act, you might want to “swamp yourself with reasons.”
To track your own driving trips, you can download the spreadsheet used by the researchers from their website: