One of the most important challenges is to understand how people are motivated to act sustainably, and how those motivations are stimulated by the design and operations of communities.
- Douglas Crawford-Brown
For those of us who pay fuel bills, saving energy by insulating our homes or perhaps installing solar panels seems to make perfect sense. It saves money, therefore as rational human beings why don’t we all do it?
It’s a question that preoccupies Dr Franz Fuerst from the Department of Land Economy. “If you just follow the bottom line, you should see a lot more investment in energy efficiency purely from a profit-maximising perspective. And we should see even more if we take the costs of climate change into account. Why it’s not happening is a puzzle that keeps me awake at night,” he admits.
Fascinated to find the factors at play, Fuerst and his colleague Ante Busic-Sontic started supplementing their economic models with insights derived from psychology.
According to their newly developed theoretical framework, our personalities – as described by the ‘Big Five’ personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – have a major influence on our decisions about investing in energy efficiency because of the way they relate to our attitudes to risk and the environment.
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Image: Green light
Credit: Josef Stuefer
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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