The NYTimes has a front-page story today (with cameo from the great Robert Cialdini!) about power utilities using social psychology to encourage customers to save energy by comparing them to their neighbors:

Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy

The power company used smiley or frowny faces to let customers know how their power consumption compared to their neighbors. They found that giving customers positive feedback in the form of smileys encouraged them to do even better on average (2%). Frowny faces, on the other hand, made customers mad and write angry letters, so the utility quit giving out negative feedback.

The inefficacy of frownys is an interesting thing. On the face of it, we might expect competitive feedback like that to encourage people to improve, to catch up with their peers. Or, maybe it would invoke a fairness norm, or simply a power consumption norm, and encourage people to catch up with the average.

I'd guess that the problem isn't lower-than-average feedback, though… it's smileys. Granted, the NYTimes doesn't give us much on the specifics of the program, so it's hard to tell. But smileys are such an ambiguous vehicle… how does one interpret their significance? I have a feeling a frown from the power company doesn't convey the intended message, it just makes people feel scolded by the power company. And what right does the power company have to scold anyone? That's just not going to work.

This same problem dooms a recent CHI paper, which comes from the good tradition of research on MovieLens, but ends up being so ambiguous that the findings are impossible to interpret:

Al Mamunur, Rashid, Kimberly Ling, Regina D. Tassone, P. Resnick, R.E. Kraut., and John Riedl. 2006. "Motivating Participation by Displaying the Value of Contribution." in ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Montreal, Canada.

Smiley, stars, etc… they're all efforts to encapsulate feedback in a way that people can quickly understand. But this is an example of how they can be counter-productive. Instead of giving blanket positive or negative feedback, the feedback should always give people something to hang their hat on. If you can find any category of power use that a given customer is doing better than average on – tell them that. Then point out the other categories where they can improve. Of course, that's a risk too. Your average consumer isn't going to spend much time looking at their feedback on the power bill.