Motivating Sustainable Behavior through Social Comparison on Online Social Visualization

Individuals could drastically reduce their carbon footprint by changing daily behaviors to more sustainable practices. In order for this change to occur, individuals must be made aware of their impact and must be provided with an incentive to change their consumption patterns. In this paper we provide a literature review of the current research in the areas of energy feedback, social psychology, and social visualization to determine functionality that is important in a computer-based feedback system to motivate users. Future work would include creating a visualization based on these findings.