Around 18% of the UK’s carbon emissions are from how we heat our homes – usually using a good old gas boiler – but these are on their way out and low carbon alternatives such as heat pumps are coming in….except not everyone is getting pumped about heat pumps. Despite the availability of grants, take up has been surprisingly slow. Compared with other countries in Europe, the UK is at the bottom of the heat pump installation league. We’re supposed to be fitting 600,000 every year by 2028 to reach our net zero targets, but we’re currently installing less than one tenth of that figure. What’s going on?
Heat pumps take in heat from the air (an air source heat pump) or the ground (a ground source heat pump) and pump it into your home. Of course, as with any new technology, it’s not quite so simple. There are a few technical issues and facts for potential customers to get their heads around, such as how well their house is insulated, the size of their radiators, the costs and the disruption associated with installing a new heating system. But, as with many decisions we make in life, this is not just about weighing facts, our emotions play an important role when we contemplate change.
And emotions can run high when people start debating the pros and cons of heat pumps – just have a look at some popular discussion forums (e.g. see Mumsnet, Pistonheads, etc). So, to begin with, I wanted to understand more about why people appear to be getting so anxious. After all, many of us never give a second thought to how we heat our homes – it’s just another utility – isn’t it?
I asked this question to Kat – who has been managing Customer Services for a company specialising in ground source heat pumps. In explaining to me why heating gets to be such a big deal, Kat drew on her psychology training and referred to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who described five sets of basic human needs in the form of a pyramid, with our physiological needs at the bottom, building up through layers of safety needs, belongness and love, our need for esteem and then, right at the top: self-actualization – things like creativity and achieving our potential. Maslow considered needs at the bottom of the pyramid will always dominate us until they are satisfied, after which we are more able to focus on higher ones.
Maslow’s hierarchy suggests our physiological need to maintain our internal environment at a constant comfortable level (so-called homeostasis) is right at the bottom of this pyramid supporting everything else. This “internal environment” includes our body temperature. Kat explained: “When we’re going into people’s homes and we’re saying, right, we want to take away your gas boiler, or we want to take away your night storage heaters, and we want to put in a heat pump, we are effectively changing the way an individual person heats their home and therefore their body. So we are changing something very physiological for them, and that causes a great amount of anxiety for individuals.”
So this is not just about heating our houses – this is about heating ourselves – our bodies – which makes it a much more personal and visceral issue. And, as anyone whose boiler has broken down in the middle of winter will know, there’s really not much else you can get on with when you’re not warm enough. As Kat puts it “people have these very basic needs to heat themselves to an element of thermal comfort. You know, the thermal comfort is very, very important because if you can’t do that, then you can’t meet all the other needs that you need to have to survive.” Indeed, research suggests that an uncomfortably cold temperature raises our blood pressure, heart and breathing rate, and reduces the ability of our brain to function. Perhaps it’s not so surprising then, that the thought of installing a new type of heating system can make us feel nervous and anxious.
I’m also one of many UK home owners who doesn’t know much about heat pumps but feels they should know more – so I signed myself up to a special scheme that allows you to visit one. It wasn’t long before I got a message back from a local Bristol resident called Joe. Joe was kind enough to invite me round to see the heat pump that was now keeping his 1930’s terraced house comfortably warm. As a product designer with an engineering background, Joe was able to tell me a lot about the technicalities of heat pumps in my brief visit. But what really fascinated me was that his decision-making hadn’t been just about assessing the technology – he’d also found himself sussing out the people who were offering it.
”You know, people come to your house they have a look around, they have to measure, they have to work out what your heat loss is and, and all the rest of it, which means you get to meet these people. Whereas if you did it online, it’d be very difficult to know, do you trust these people?”
Joe used his background to size up their skills, but he was also interested in their motivations. He was noticing whether their values chimed with his own environmental leanings or whether this was just about making money. He was trying to determine whether they were listening to his needs and wanted to adapt what they were offering to fit those needs, and whether they wanted to explain issues not just to him, but also whether they were prepared to involve his family in the conversation too.
“So you have a long conversation with them and you very quickly get an impression of whether they are salespeople or engineers and what their vested interest is. Everybody has a vested interest. Are they here to just get the grant and go, or are they here to green up our heating and make a new industry?”
So this is not just about weighing up costs and efficiencies – there’s this other stuff Joe was interested in too. He was sizing up who he was dealing with so he could place trust in them. We always experience some uncertainty when we think about investing in something new – we have to weigh up the anticipated rewards against the risks – including the chance of betrayal. Trust has to form in order for us to bridge all the uncertainty and commit. So how does trust form in the brain?
We have two networks in our brains that are particularly helpful in building the trust that overcomes our uncertainty. One of these involves engaging your frontal cortex (in red) on the facts and figures and doing your research, exactly what is the best deal available – what will maximise anticipated rewards and minimise the hazards?
But once you’ve got that far, another network gets involved, called the default mode network (outlined in blue – based on Graner et al., 2013). This network is about you – your Default Mode Network activates more when you think about yourself in the imaginary future – such as how you might get on with someone further down the line. This network helps you evaluate the trustworthiness of a relationship. If you’ve already gone down this sort of road before with someone and things have turned out ok, then that will add to those anticipated rewards and might even reduce activity in the default mode network. If you already have a good level of trust, you don’t need to suss them out. But with a new product like a heat pump, and especially with a new company, the Default Mode Network will play an important role in evaluating trustworthiness. However good the deal, do you trust who is offering it – how will you be getting on with these people further down the line? And research shows we’re more likely to trust someone if we think they can understand us. Just listening appears to build trust.
As Kat put it, “Trust is huge….It’s not about just selling a heat pump to somebody. It’s about understanding actually what is that individual person’s needs for thermal comfort? Is that heat pump going to work for that person’s needs?”
What other people say about a product or a company can also have a great influence on our trust. That’s especially true when it’s a “seal of approval” from a recognised standards agency. In the case of installing renewable energy systems like heat pumps, customers are likely to be reassured by MCS accreditation. When researchers in Spain compared the brain activities of consumers looking at different types of information online, they found seals of approval increased activity in the brain’s reward system. That suggests anticipation of reward and the formation of an immediate sense of trust – even though the consumers hadn’t yet had any dealings with the company. In contrast, however, when the consumers were looking at customer reviews, those networks for evaluating trustworthiness activated again – as if they were asking “Can we trust the reviews that are telling us to trust the product?”
Continuing on my tour of local heat pumps, I visited Celine who had just had a heat pump installed in her 5-bedroom house in Chepstow. Celine was familiar with seeing heat pumps working well in France, including in very old houses in the Alps, so she had no problems with the basic idea of heat pumps.
“My worry was not about the heat pump technology. I absolutely trust it and I trust it’s sufficient. My worry was more like when you do any work in your house, will the installer be good? Will they do what they plan to do? Will they be on time? Will there be hidden cost? Will they be …..I mean it’s a massive investment. So will it be worth it in the end? How can I trust them? I don’t know any one of them!”
Happily, the installation process went well. Celine was without water for 3 days, but plenty of prior warning from the installing engineer had allowed her to prepare for this inconvenience. Trust can be damaged when expectations are not managed, so I asked how she might have felt if that warning had not been provided.
“….you have to make arrangements.” she replied, “So yeah, that would have probably changed my whole experience about having a heat pump installed.”
In such cases, trust can be rebuilt and financial compensation activates brain networks involved with forgiveness but, interestingly, overcompensation doesn’t always makes us feel better. Scientists in Belgium allocated paid work unfairly to their participants while they were having their brains scanned, and then later offered to overcompensate them with more money than their participants had actually lost. The effect was more activation in those brain regions for assessing trustworthiness. In other words, overcompensation seems to make us more suspicious and distrusting.
Joe and Celine are early adopters – people who have that additional understanding, awareness and motivation to be in the vanguard of changes that we’ll all soon be facing. And talking to them, and to Kat, has really emphasised to me how important trust is when it comes to stepping into the future – and how trust forms in both rational and emotional, intuitive ways. This issue of trust is something that the energy industry may have to focus on more – as the rest of us start thinking about low carbon heating and ditching our gas boilers.
To discover more, listen to the associated podcast.