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Psychologists hypothesize that the effectiveness of normative messaging interventions increases when individuals have more personal attachment and similarity with reference groups. Using readily available energy consumption data, it is now possible to create highly personalized reference groups based on households’ daily energy use in a non-invasive matter. However, it still remains unclear to what degree individuals perceive behavioral reference groups as a cohesive entity. Therefore, this research investigates how individuals perceive energy profile-based groups relative to more standard geographic proximity-based groups. An online survey is conducted with 1,928 U.S. adults. Individuals do not perceive the profile-based groups as very entitative groups. Also, similarity between energy profile-based group members indirectly affects individuals’ identification with the groups via group entitativity. Lastly, this indirect effect is larger than the direct effect of similarity between group members on group identification. These results imply that a better understanding of what affects group entitativity would allow interveners to create more effective normative feedback messages. 

Normative messaging interventions have proven to be a cost-effective strategy for promoting pro-environmental behaviors. The effectiveness of normative messages is partially determined by how personally relevant the comparison groups are as well as the lag of feedback. Using readily available energy use data has created opportunities to generate highly personalized reference groups based on households’ behavioral patterns. Unfortunately, it is not well understood how data granularity (e.g., minute, hour) affects the performance of behavioral reference group categorization. This is important because different levels of data granularity can produce conflicting results in terms of group similarity and vary in computational time. Therefore, this research aims to evaluate the performance of clustering methods across different levels of temporal granularity of energy use data. A clustering analysis is conducted using one-year of energy use data from 3,000 households in Holland, Michigan. The clustering results show that behavioral reference groups become the most similar when representing households’ energy use behaviors at a six-hour interval. Computationally, less granular data (i.e., six and twelve hours) takes less time than highly granular data which increases exponentially with more households. Considering the enormous scale that normative messaging interventions need to be applied at, using less granular data (six-hour intervals) will permit interveners to maximize the effectiveness of highly personalized normative feedback messages while minimizing computation burdens.