A Socio-Economic Survey for Understanding Self-Perceived Effectiveness of Persuasive Strategies Towards Energy Efficiency in Tertiary Buildings

Human energy behavior in buildings has been identified as one of the main opportunities with high energy saving potential for both residential and tertiary buildings. Even though a lot of research has been invested in the last decade on this domain, there are still certain aspects that remain controversial and unidentified, especially in terms of socio-economic characteristics. To address this challenge, a new survey is proposed, publicly available through Zenodo, that covers a variety of different aspects that include both technical and socio-cultural traits aiming to fully depict the factors/drivers that affect occupant energy-related behavior at tertiary buildings and correlate them with 15 known strategies of persuasion to motivate people to behave pro-environmentally. The survey was deployed in four EU countries, six different cities and seven buildings, resulting in a total of 330 responses. Among different results, the descriptive analyses show that even though 40% of the total sample was still hesitating to behave pro-environmentally at their workplace, over 90% of all respondents had a positive attitude towards it. Finally, the prescriptive analysis revealed that only five socio-economic factors actually show dependencies on persuasive principles, with the most promising one being the willingness of employees to join a pro-environmental campaign in the work center. Besides, it was found that Praising people for behaving energy efficiently showed correlation with more than one factor which is in line with the literature.