Electricity saving behavior in student dorms: What message framing works?

•Reporting peer-comparison jointly with an emoticon of social acceptance to students leads to a 3.63% electricity usage reduction.•For the first time in a Southeast Asian setting, the boomerang effect plays a part when an emoticon is absent.•Students do not feel responsible for the indirect electricity induced CO2 emission as they do for the direct electricity consumption in kilowatt hours.•There is no evidence of electricity saving when the number of peers in peer-comparison is small.•Our results contribute to the limited literature on Southeast Asian behavioral experiments toward sustainability and climate change information.