Behavioural interventions that leverage social norms are widely used to foster energy conservation. For instance, home energy reports combine information on others’ behaviour (descriptive feedback) and approval for norm compliant behaviour (injunctive feedback). In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated how descriptive and injunctive feedbacks interact to affect electricity use, and evaluate the effects of additional normative feedback presented in the form of descriptive or injunctive energy conservation norm primes. We found that consistent descriptive and injunctive feedback boosts the effectiveness of social information in inducing energy conservation. When descriptive and injunctive feedback are in conflict, conservation behaviour is a function of the relative strength of the two types of feedback. Additional normative feedback produces smaller gains when it reinforces existing information of the same type. These results suggest complementarities between different types of normative messages rather than superiority of any one kind of feedback.

利用社会规范的行为干预被广泛用于促进节能。例如，家庭能源报告将有关他人行为的信息（描述性反馈）和对符合规范的行为的批准（禁令性反馈）结合在一起。在一项随机对照试验中，我们研究了描述性和禁令性反馈如何相互作用以影响用电量，并评估了以描述性或禁令性节能标准素数形式呈现的其他规范性反馈的影响。我们发现一致的描述性和禁令性反馈提高了社会信息在诱导节能方面的有效性。当描述性和禁制性反馈冲突时，保护行为是两种类型反馈的相对强度的函数。当额外的规范反馈加强了相同类型的现有信息时，会产生较小的收益。这些结果表明，不同类型的规范性消息之间是互补的，而不是任何一种反馈的优势。