A trip to Sacramento - Guanyu Yang attends the Behaviour, Energy and Climate Change Conference

As a final-year PhD student from the Energy Institute, I was invited to present my social norms experiment on office personal cooling, the centrepiece of my PhD project, at the BECC conference ('Behavior, Energy and Climate Change') on 12-15 November in Sacramento, United States.

I actively participated in the pre-conference workshop for brainstorming the next social science questions for equitable energy transitions for the Department of Energy in the United States. My contribution to the discussion also drew others’ attention to the importance of cultural norms and social expectations in the area.

My presentation was scheduled in the first lightning session of the conference and was well received and prompted a lot of interest in the audience who later went on to inquire more about my work. My presentation began with my own story of feeling freezingly cold in an exam venue in Hong Kong. I then went on to introduce my experimental design of the online survey experiment on financial workers in Guangdong Province. My overall results suggested that a positive effect was only found on choosing lighter clothing when both norms were used, while none of the social-norm treatments worked on the use of personal cooling devices. I ended my presentation by highlighting the limits of social-norm interventions and the need to explore other forms of social-norm interventions especially in the field settings. The questions from the audience and the other presentations at that session inspired me to beware of the limits of my experimental design. One speaker even approached me and asked me for more detailed advice on how to encourage their office colleagues to turn down their AC temperatures by implementing the personal cooling strategies as mentioned in my presentation. I was very thrilled to see their interest in my work, which is very relevant to the US context with their renounced reliance on AC in office buildings. 

Image: Guanyu Yang participating in a panel session during the 2023 BECC Conference, Sacramento, U.S.A.

In addition to my own presentation session, I had a chance to connect with the BECC community with people from both academic and industrial backgrounds, such as the representatives from Oracle / Opower and the See Change Institute. Over formal and informal conversations, I learned that many utilities companies in the United States are starting to pay much attention to behavioural programs and that without understanding and engaging users, technological innovation would not be as effective in the energy transitions.

The final keynote speeches in recognizing the role of social expectations and leveraging the entertainment industry were hugely inspiring. The emphasis on social influence as an ending to the conference has confirmed again that my PhD work has the potential to help promote sustainable behaviour and boosted my motivation to research further on the power of social norms.

Being selected as one of the 16 BECC Fellows at the 2023 conference, I joined the other outstanding PhD students and post-docs in the field. I volunteered to assist with one presentation session featuring the theme of Equity by helping with keeping time. Overall, I felt that the conference was very well-organized with pre-conference discussion with the session monitors alongside fun activities, such as BECC buddies meet-up and morning running, during which I enjoyed the beautiful scenery along the Sacramento river.

Links

• Learn more about Guanyu and her work - access this external webpage.
• Learn more about the conference - access this external webpage.

Images credit: Guanyu Yang