Energy-Saving Intention of College Students: History
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Menglin Xing
,
Xi Luo
,
Xiaojun Liu
,
ma zhenchuan
,

As college students bear little energy cost of public buildings on campus, information intervention is more feasible than economic intervention to augment the energy-saving intention of college students. College students are sensitive to environmental information; thus, building energy consumption information, which reflects the energy consumption levels of the environment where students live, may be effective to promote the energy-saving intention of college students.

  • energy-saving intention
  • building energy consumption

1. Introduction

Building energy saving is one of the important ways to promote carbon emission reduction [1]. Among various kinds of buildings, college buildings deserve special attention due to their high energy consumption. The energy consumption of American college’s accounts for 13% of the total building energy consumption [2], and the energy consumption of French colleges accounts for 38% of public facilities [3]. In addition, the energy consumption intensity of college buildings is also higher than that of other buildings. Research shows that the energy consumption per unit area of college buildings is 5–10 times that of ordinary houses [4]. One of the important reasons for the high energy consumption in colleges is that few college students are required to pay for the energy they have used [5]. At the same time, electricity price may limit users’ enthusiasm for energy-saving [6]. Therefore, economic policies, namely the economic intervention, are not effective for altering energy-saving intentions of college students. Aside from economic intervention, information intervention is also effective to promote energy saving [7]. At the practical level, the Chinese government has clearly point out that it is necessary to improve energy-saving intention of college students by disclosing and proving relevant information [8][9]. However, what kind of information to provide and how to improve its effect remain to be answered.
Economic intervention affects behavior patterns, while information intervention affects cognition. Energy-saving, as a part of pro-environmental behavior, is affected by environmental cognition. Environmental cognition of daily life links the basic attitude and behavior cognition, and has a regulatory effect in the formation of intention [10]. Campus buildings constitute the environment for the daily study and life of college students. Due to their higher-intensity environmental scanning [11], college students are more sensitive to the building environment including building energy consumption. The research of Fu et.al. also shows that intention is related to the surrounding environment [12]. That is, building energy consumption may have a significant impact on the energy-saving behavior of college students. However, it is difficult to judge the result of the impact, because college students usually experience great changes in cognitive structure while in the stage of socialization [11]. Since the cognitive structure affects the understanding and thoughts of college students regarding problems or events [13], college students’ cognition of building energy consumption information may be uncertain, meaning that the impact of building energy consumption information (BECI) is difficult to judge. Therefore, in order to better understand the impact of BECI, the following two aspects should be clarified. First, is the impact positive or negative? Second, through what path does BECI affect the energy-saving intention of college students? By exploring these questions, some guidance on the information intervention for college students could be provided in the future, including whether to disclose building energy consumption information and how to design information content to realize the intervention.
Although the content of information intervention and disclosure have become research hot spots, most of the research focuses either on the ecological worldview, which is macroscopic [14], or on the energy-saving technologies or skills, which is microscopic. The attention to intermediate perspective, that is, the energy and environment information, is not enough. The ecological worldview is the result of relevant research summarized by scholars, it includes environmental concern [14], understanding of climate change, and environmental issues [7]. Ecological worldview is regarded as the basis for the formation of generalized pro-environmental behavior [15], and has been proven to have a positive impact on energy-saving intention. However, the ecological worldview is not the only factor affecting energy-saving intention. At the micro level, the information of energy-saving technologies or skills can affect the energy-saving intention through skill and behavior choices. For example, information on personal energy-saving skills usually has a positive impact on energy-saving intention, including information on household energy-saving skills [16] and information on specific measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions [17]. However, information related to the progress of energy-saving technology, including energy-saving products [18] and the stand-by energy consumption of electrical appliances [19], may have negative impacts on energy-saving intention due to the rebound effect (that is, although energy efficiency is improved, energy consumption may not be reduced) [20]. Existing studies show that the ecological worldview affects the basic attitude of all pro-environmental behaviors at the macro level, and energy-saving technology mainly affects the means to achieve energy saving at the micro level, thus affecting the energy-saving intention. In contrast, building energy consumption information acts on environmental perception. The relationship of the three types of information is shown in Figure 1. The impact and significance of environmental perception on energy-saving can be supported by social cognitive theory (SCT).
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Figure 1. The connection and difference of the three types of information.
SCT agrees that perceptions serve as mediators and coordinators among environments, perceptions, and behaviors. Perceptions have direct impacts on personal behaviors, and personal cognition is subject to the surrounding environment [10]. In addition, perceptions of the surrounding environment are sometimes rational, and information disclosure can impact personal or group environmental perceptions obviously [21]. That is, the information of surrounding environment will play a vital role in cognition, thus affecting intention and behavior [22]. The above research supports the theoretical impact of BECI on energy-saving intention of college students. However, the specific mechanism of the impact still cannot be explained. Namely, the action target and action path are not clear. College students are in the transition period from campus to society. Thus, their experience consists of both campus experience and social experience. Because experience impacts perception significantly [23], the environmental perception of college students and the cognition caused by perception may be specific. It is necessary to study the mechanism of BECI on energy-saving intention of college students. However, the impact of information disclosure on China’s environmental problems is still not clear [24], and the current research on the impacts of information disclosure on group behavior and intention focuses more on economics rather than environment [25][26]. Therefore, it is necessary to study the impact of BECI on energy-saving intention of college students, especially to explore its mechanism and action path.
However, there are few studies on the mechanism of information intervention in the existing research. Although some studies considered various kinds of information when studying the energy-saving intention, the information was only taken as the research background rather than an important variable. For example, Song et al. [27] used the Norm Activation Model to take haze pollution as the background, then setting norms, responsibilities, and other variables that related to the haze pollution. However, the information on haze pollution was not been considered as a specific factor. Trotta [17] regarded the impact of information as a pro-environmental variable to study the influencing factors on energy-saving intention. Although some scholars took the information of specific content as an independent variable, they only tested whether the information had a significant effect on energy-saving intention, the mechanism and path of action were not deeply explored. For example, Pothitou et al. [28] and Ding et al. [16] tested whether information on carbon emission reduction or energy-saving household appliances, respectively, would affect the energy-saving intention. In summary, there is a relative lack of research on the action mechanism of energy-saving intention based on information content.

2. Influencing Factors on Energy-Saving Intention

Attitude in TPB refers to the cognition of behavior and its consequences [15], and the related knowledge and information are factors influencing this cognition [29]. Since one of the key goals is to explore how the BECI affects energy-saving intentions, the mechanism of BECI on attitude is analyzed. Based on this, researchers specifically study one of the elements of attitude, that is, the PV of energy saving. PV represents college students’ judgments on the value of a certain behavior. Note that the judgements are related to the social practice experience of college students. The relationship between PV and INT is similar to the relationship between attitude and intention in TPB [30].
The second factor is norm. In recent years, many relevant research divided norms into subjective norms [31], descriptive norms (Ding et al., 2019), and PN [27]. Subjective norms refer to the social pressures on individuals when they carry out their behaviors—the norms formed by the behavior of people around researchers. However, it is unknown to what extent the formation of people’s behavior around researchers is affected by BECI, so it is not suitable to accurately express the influence of BECI. Descriptive norms refer to how to carry norms out in a specific situation. Although BECI can provide background knowledge, it cannot create a specific situation. PN, defined as the moral obligation to fulfill or not perform a particular act [32], is mainly about personal cognition and principles of conduct rather than external pressure, which can directly show the impact of BECI on individuals. In addition, PN can reflect the judgment of college students on energy-saving
The third factor is perceived behavior control. Perceived behavior control refers to the expectation of resources and obstacles related to the implementation of behavior. This factor is not directly related to background information such as BECI, so researchers do not consider the influence of this factor on this study’s target problems.

3. Influencing Factors of Perceived Value

The concept of PV originally refers to consumers’ perceived preference and evaluation of products; it affects the whole process of consumers’ perception, evaluation, and purchase of products [33]. On the basis of this concept, scholars have put forward the concept of green PV, which refers to consumers’ overall assessment of the net income of a product or service based on environmental aspirations and expectations of sustainability [34]. In recent years, the concept of PV has been used to study issues surrounding the environment and energy saving [30][35]. According to the definition of PV in the above literature, researchers use PV to describe college students’ overall evaluation of the net income of energy saving.
In recent years, research on PV and energy saving or environmental intention suggests that PV can be further subdivided [36] into categories such as perceived quality, perceived price, and perceived environmental values. These factors will significantly affect consumers’ purchase intention for energy-saving devices in a positive way [37]. Some studies divide the factors that affect PV into perceived benefit (PB) and perceived sacrifices—the cost of implementing green consumption. Moreover, PB is positively correlated with green consumption intention, while perceived sacrifice is negatively correlated [38]. Based on the references cited above, three influencing factors of PV are set according to the analysis of value composition in technical economics [39]. The three influencing factors are PB, perceived costs (PC), and perceived risk of non-implementation of energy saving (PR). In addition, it is necessary to assume that BECI has an impact on these three factors.

4. Influencing Factors of Personal Norm

At present, relevant studies suggest that PN are influenced by attitude, consequence, responsibility [40][41], environmental concern, and perceived consumer effect [27]. As mentioned earlier, researchers assume that BECI will affect INT and that the attitude can be divided into three aspects: PB, PC, and PR. Among the three aspects, PB and PR can reflect the consequences, while PC reflects the ascription of responsibility
According to the above assumptions, researchers established a structural model as shown in Figure 2.
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Figure 2. Structural model of the research.

5. Interaction Effects

There may be interaction between PV and PN, PB and PC, PB and PR, and PC and PR. For example, when studying recycling intention, some scholars found that norms and attitudes affect the intention interactively, and there are also interactions between different types of norms [31]. Ru et al. [42] found that there was also interaction between perceived behavioral control and different types of norms. Since researchers use the idea of technological economics to extract PV, PB, PC, and PR from attitudes, it is necessary to examine whether there is interaction in between. The interacting effects which need to be examined include the effect of PN and PV, PB and PC, PB and PR, and PC and PR (as shown by the blue dashed arrow in Figure 2).

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/buildings12060769

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