Using Collective Engagement Approaches to Support Behaviour Change and Collective Identity Formation via Energy Management Applications: A Gender-Aware Online Experiment

Achieving the energy transition is critical for moving towards a more sustainable future and end-users play an important role in this. But sustained, intrinsically motivated engagement still proves to be a challenge and approaches that successfully support sustained engagement and engage people more equally are needed. The use of collective perspectives in engagement to promote the development of shared green identities and the building of intrinsic motivation seems a promising approach. To facilitate their integration in behaviour change tools, a collective engagement framework was developed and used as conceptual base for the definition of collective identity amplifiers as interaction design
elements to be integrated into digital support systems for behaviour change. In an online experiment aimed to explore the impact of collective amplification, interaction screens for both individually-focused and collectively-framed engagement approaches were developed for six persuasive strategies, and tested with regards to their respective behaviour change potential and potential interactions with gender identity. Results indicated no statistically significant effect of collective framing on behaviour change potential, communication
preferences regarding benefits, or social identity perception in this setting. Statistically significant, gender-specific engagement effects were observed around responsiveness to altruistic vs. egocentric benefit communication, with results showing a decreased response to egocentric framings for women and an increased response to altruistic framings for men in the collective condition. We recommend the application of the framework in a field study to truly test its potential and validate the observed gender-related impact of collective
engagement on benefit communication preferences.