In a 24-week field experiment involving 140 student households in Stockholm, weekly comparisons with other households and practical, appliance-specific energy-saving tips both helped restrain electricity use during winter. The report describes the study as a direct test of two psychological approaches: “nudging,” through comparison feedback, and “boosting,” through tips people could act on.
The team, led by Mannheim-based consumer psychologist Dr. Yavor Paunov and colleagues, tracked actual electricity consumption. Households receiving weekly comparisons were told how their use compared with that of other households. The boost group received energy-saving tips tailored to appliances. Both interventions significantly reduced consumption compared with a control group, according to the report. The effects did not differ significantly from one another, despite the researchers’ initial expectation that the tips would lead to lower use than the comparisons.
Together, the interventions saved seven megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity. The report offers a scale comparison: an average single-person household in Germany uses about 1.2 MWh per year. That comparison helps convey the study’s combined savings, though it does not establish what either intervention would save in a different housing setting or over a year.
The study’s longer tracking period and use of actual consumption data make it a useful test of whether the approaches change behavior in everyday life. The report notes that relatively few earlier studies directly compared different energy-saving strategies; some relied on simulated online scenarios, self-selected participants or shorter observation periods. The experiment therefore adds evidence about these two approaches in one real-world setting, while leaving open how broadly its results apply.
The analyses also suggest that baseline use may matter. Among participants who began with high electricity consumption, boost tips were associated with a reduction of 3.97 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per week compared with the control group. The corresponding reduction for the nudge group was 3.12 kWh per week. These subgroup results point to the possibility that people with higher starting use could have more room to reduce it, but the report does not establish that the same pattern would occur in other households.
The setting is an important limit. Participants lived in student residence halls, so the results cannot readily be generalized to other population groups or living arrangements. The halls were also close together; residents may have discussed the interventions, potentially narrowing differences between groups. That possibility makes it harder to treat the comparison between nudging and boosting as a definitive ranking.
The paper is reported as published in *Scientific Reports* in 2026. Paunov collected the data while working at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and wrote the paper at the University of Mannheim. The findings suggest that both social comparison and actionable advice can curb electricity use in student housing, but further evidence is needed to know how well either approach transfers to other settings.