Overcoming Salience Bias: How Real-Time Feedback Fosters Resource Conservation

Research Interest
Inattention and imperfect information bias behavior toward the salient and immediately visible. This distortion causes costs to individuals, the organizations they work in, and society at large. We show that an effective way to overcome this bias is making the implications of one’s behavior salient in real time, while individuals can directly adapt. In a large-scale field experiment, we give participants real-time feedback on the resource consumption of an energy-intensive behavior. We find that real-time feedback reduces resource consumption for the target behavior by 22%. At the household level, this leads to much larger conservation gains than conventional policy interventions that provide aggregate feedback on resource use. The approach addresses salience bias directly, and avoids the negative psychological pressure that has been observed with other interventions. More generally, reducing the impact of salience bias through real-time feedback can improve private and business decisions, and make markets more efficient.