Childhood Habits Shape Adult Thermostat Settings and Energy Use

Early-life routines are often difficult to shake off. Findings from a new survey indicate that the way people set their thermostat today may be shaped by the homes in which they were raised.

A recent paper, playfully entitled "Turn down for watt", indicates that the average American is reluctant to lower their thermostat, despite heating and cooling making up a substantial share of household energy bills.

Instead, householders often appear to replicate their parents’ approach.

"Specifically, individuals who grew up in warmer homes tend to maintain higher thermostat settings in their current homes, suggesting a lasting influence of early thermal environments on current temperature preferences," write organisational behaviour researcher Dritjon Gruda of Maynooth University in Ireland and Paul Hanges, an organisational psychologist at the University of Maryland in the US.

Childhood habits and thermostat settings

Residential energy use now represents 21 percent of total energy consumption in the US, with household heating and cooling responsible for more than half of that amount.

Although half of US homes are unoccupied during the day, many people still leave their heating or air conditioning running while nobody is there. According to some surveys, only 42 percent of American homeowners alter their thermostat settings to cut energy use and costs.

These behaviours raise household bills as well as wasting energy. The new survey suggests that such preferences may take root during childhood.

"Understanding what motivates consumer heating and cooling choice is an important avenue for potentially reducing the burning of fossil fuels," write Gruda and Hanges.

The researchers surveyed 2,128 people from throughout the United States. Participants reported the average winter thermostat settings in their homes both as adults and during childhood, and also assessed how emotionally connected they felt to their community.

Participants living in colder winter areas who had been raised in warmer homes – maintained at 26.67 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) – preferred warmer homes as adults than those raised in colder childhood homes – maintained at 21.11 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit).

The pattern remained even after accounting for race, education, household income and geographic mobility.

While childhood habits can be "deeply entrenched and difficult to change", Gruda and Hanges note that they are not impossible to alter.

Community ties, climate and energy use

How strongly respondents identified with, or felt connected to, their community was found to "strongly" affect the link between their current thermostat use and their upbringing.

For example, people who had moved to colder winter locations such as New York and felt strongly connected to their local community generally kept a lower thermostat setting than participants who felt less at home in their community.

As might be expected, residents of warmer places such as Florida typically use central heating less and rely on air conditioning to cool their homes, including in winter. Yet, once more, feeling integrated within the local community appears able to weaken this tendency to some extent.

"Individuals who indicated high community fit reported higher home temperatures, due to likely more limited air conditioning," the psychologists note.

This points to peers potentially influencing energy consumption. However, because the researchers did not directly measure community norms, they caution that the findings should be interpreted carefully.

Limits of the thermostat survey

The results rely on self-reported information, so there is no guarantee that respondents accurately described their thermostat settings in either adulthood or childhood.

Moreover, a thermostat’s set temperature may not match the actual temperature inside a home. This can be especially hard to regulate in older properties with poorer insulation.

Gruda and Hanges argue that future studies should address these limitations and investigate the cultural influences that shape how people heat and cool their homes.

"Without understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms and drivers of behavior," the psychologists write, we will fail to explain "why rational consumers do not necessarily strive to optimize their energy consumption."

The study was published in PLOS Climate.