How many appliances do you own that have the Energy Label? How many ticks does it have? Are you an A grade student when it comes to energy efficiency at home?
The National Environment Agency has initiated campaigns such as the “Save Energy Save Money” campaign, which advocates the practice of simple energy-saving habits at home (“Household Sector,” 2019). By saving energy at home, fewer fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity and thus less greenhouse gas emissions. This would help slow the rate of rising sea levels.
According to Energy Efficient Singapore, approximately 75% of the households surveyed practice simple energy-saving habits like switching off at the power socket when not in use (“Energy Saving Tips,” 2019). What about the remaining 25%? What could be the reasons for them not practising this?
Social Norms
The type of social norms operating in the situation plays a part in how an individual behaves. In an experiment conducted by Reno, Cialdini and Kallgren, results showed that the likelihood of individual littering differed significantly depending on whether the injunctive or descriptive norms were salient. Injunctive norm is the “perception of what behaviours are approved or disapproved by others”. While the descriptive norm is the “perception of how people actually behave in given situations, regardless of whether the behaviour is approved or disapproved of by others”. When injunctive norm was salient, littering was low in both settings – clean and littered environment. Whereas when the descriptive norm was salient, littering was low only in the clean setting. In the littered setting, seeing other people litter made you litter as well (Aronson et al., 2013). Now let’s apply this understanding to our issue. Although people are aware that practising simple energy-saving habits improves the climate change situation (injunctive norm), we believe that not everybody does it (descriptive norm). This results in an increased demand for electricity and thus increased greenhouse gas emissions. This descriptive norm is salient when people can personally feel the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions, such as the increase in global temperature. Furthermore, when people see and hear about the campaigns promoting energy-saving habits, it affirms their belief that there are still people out there who are not cultivating energy-saving habits. Hence, people start to follow suit. This could be a feasible explanation to why some individuals are not motivated to adopt energy-saving practices, resulting in increased greenhouse gas emissions and hence rising sea levels.