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The purpose of this study was to determine whether, and how, electricity consumption by students in university residence halls were impacted through three intervention strategies.

The current investigation uses a quasi-experimental design by exposing freshman students in four matched residence halls and the use of three different interventions designed to encourage energy conservation, specifically electricity conservation. A control residence hall received no intervention. One residence hall had an energy dashboard prominently displayed. Another received various communications and programming designed to raise awareness of the need for energy conservation. A fourth residence hall had an energy dashboard and received programming. Electricity consumption among the residence halls was compared using multivariate analysis.

Students in all residence halls receiving interventions demonstrated significantly lower electricity consumption compared to the control residence hall. Across two years with different student populations, results were consistent: the residence hall receiving only the communications and programming, but not the dashboard, had the lowest electricity use. The residence hall with only the dashboard also demonstrated a significant but smaller decline in electricity use. Curiously, the residence hall wherein both interventions were used demonstrated the smallest decline in electricity use.

While total costs for the communications and programming are difficult to accurately assess, the results suggest that this approach is cost-effective when compared to the avoided cost of electricity and is superior in terms of electricity cost savings to both the dashboards and to the combined intervention. Results also suggest that any intervention is likely to induce a large enough electricity reduction to be cost-effective and there may be non-economic benefits as well.

This study takes advantage of the availability of four “matched” residence halls to approximate the rigor of a controlled quasi-experimental design to compare different strategies for inducing electricity consumption among freshman residents.

Gender constitutes one of the fundamental distinctions that organize social interaction. It is a salient social distinction in all societies, is a core personal identity for social actors, and is often used to generate expectations for competence in task-focused mixed-sex groups. In this chapter, we explore the effect of androgynous (gender ambiguous) appearance on task performance of observers. We demonstrate that it takes longer for research participants to define the gender identity of such individuals. More importantly, we hypothesize that since androgynous individuals do not fit easily into gender schemas that people use to access information about interaction partners, the presence of an androgynous-looking person will slow performance on a cognitive task. An experimental study supports both hypotheses. We conclude with suggestions about how the presence of non-stereotypical interaction partners with ambiguous identities might influence group members’ task performance, cognitive inferences about and affective responses to other group members.