Abstract
Social norms play an important role in shaping human behaviour. They guide people how to behave under certain circumstances by informing what is permitted and prohibited. Research works have shown that social norms can be successfully employed in promoting sustainable practices such as energy conservation. In particular, the combined effect of descriptive and injunctive norms has been shown to bear a positive influence in shaping social behaviour and is being employed by organizations for social norm marketing. Towards the goal of facilitating the reduction of energy consumption in households, this simulation-based study investigates three simple agent-based models (global, local and similarity models) for spreading social norms based behaviour. In this context, first, the effectiveness of adopting a descriptive norm is compared across the three different models. Second, the role of combining both descriptive and injunctive norms on the reduction of energy utilization is investigated. Third, a meta-norm based intervention approach is proposed and investigated which aims at increasing the rate at which a society can converge to a decreased value of energy consumption in a society.
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Savarimuthu, B.T.R., Purvis, M., Verhagen, H. (2012). An Agent-Based Simulation of Employing Social Norms in Energy Conservation in Households. In: Cranefield, S., Song, I. (eds) Agent Based Simulation for a Sustainable Society and Multi-agent Smart Computing. PRIMA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7580. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35612-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35612-4_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35611-7
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