Promoting energy conservation through attention control and construct activation: A field test at a campus laundry

Steven G. Buzinski; Tatum A. Jolink; Olivia C. Smith; Amit M. Ariely; Paschal Sheeran

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0344049

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 22, 2025
19 Dec 2025 Decision Letter - Jamil Afzal, Editor Promoting Energy Conservation through Attentional Control and Construct Activation: A Field Test at a Campus Laundry PLOS One Dear Dr. Buzinski, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 01 2026 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. A letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). 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If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->?> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available??> The PLOS Data policy Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** Reviewer #1: This article provides a detailed discussion on how cold water washing can reduce energy consumption. After minor revisions, this paper can be published. It is suggested to add corresponding charts for comparison. Reviewer #2: Review I commend the authors for addressing an important, practical issue. The increase in cold water use from 25% to 57% shows the impact of applied psychological science. The use of direct observation in both studies adds rigor to pro-environmental research. These findings are a valuable and scalable contribution. Key Comments for Improvement 1. Theoretical Mechanism (Attention): The main weakness is that self-reported attention did not explain the intervention’s effect, even though the paper focuses on “Attentional Control.” You should discuss whether attention was just needed for noticing the messages, or if measurement issues hid a real effect. Please clarify why attention mattered but didn’t mediate the effect. 2. Study 2 Control Group Contamination: Not removing pre-existing signage in the control group threatens the study’s validity. This may have influenced the control group’s beliefs or behavior. Please discuss how this condition differs from a true baseline with no signage. 3. Low Normative Beliefs Scale Reliability: The reliability of the Normative Beliefs scale (α = .62) in Study 1 is low. Since the intervention used a strong normative message, this weak measurement may explain why you didn’t find an effect. Please note this as a limitation. 4. Limited Sample Generalizability: Over 90% of participants in both studies were first-year undergraduates, who have little laundry experience. State clearly that these results mainly apply to novice groups. 5. Need to Separate Intervention Elements: Future research should break down the intervention package (arrow + three messages) to see if just the arrow or just the control belief message is effective, making the intervention more efficient. Minor Grammar and Clarity Issues: page 11, line 233: Change to “The second was the self-reported question: ‘Which wash cycle did you select?’” Page 10, line 217: Change “cutout window” to “large viewing window” or “large pane-glass window.” ****** what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes: Aftab Haider ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] To ensure your figures meet our technical requirements, please review our figure guidelines: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures You may also use PLOS’s free figure tool, NAAS, to help you prepare publication quality figures: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures#loc-tools-for-figure-preparation. NAAS will assess whether your figures meet our technical requirements by comparing each figure against our figure specifications. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Review.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0344049.r001
Revision 1
1 Feb 2026 Author Response Response to Additional Requirements: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf We have followed the PLOS ONE style requirements, and the manuscript is now in compliance. 2. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the repository name and/or the DOI/accession number of each dataset. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to provide these details on a very short timeline. We therefore suggest that you provide this information now, though we will not hold up the peer review process if you are unable. Repository name on OSF: Promoting Energy Conservation through Attention Control and Construct Activation: A Field Test at a Campus Laundry Project DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BFYWK Study 1 DOI: https://osf.io/bfywk/files/osfstorage/604fc0e736e58b02a6bc24ea Study 2 DOI: https://osf.io/bfywk/files/osfstorage/604fc6385ca6c700097880ea 3. We note that Figure 1a in your submission contain copyrighted images. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For more information, see our copyright guidelines:http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission. Thank you for bringing this to our awareness. We have removed the copyrighted images. Response to Reviewers: I commend the authors for addressing an important, practical issue. The increase in cold water use from 25% to 57% shows the impact of applied psychological science. The use of direct observation in both studies adds rigor to pro-environmental research. These findings are a valuable and scalable contribution. We thank the reviewer for the positive evaluation of the level of contribution of our research and their appreciation of the work’s translational value. We are grateful for the reviewer’s engaged and constructive feedback and have endeavored to address each of the points raised in the reviews. Key Comments for Improvement 1. Theoretical Mechanism (Attention): The main weakness is that self-reported attention did not explain the intervention’s effect, even though the paper focuses on “Attentional Control.” You should discuss whether attention was just needed for noticing the messages, or if measurement issues hid a real effect. Please clarify why attention mattered but didn’t mediate the effect. This is an important issue and we appreciate the reviewer’s request for greater clarity concerning the theoretical mechanism underlying the impact of our intervention. We have substantially revised the discussion to address the two points raised by the reviewer (pp. 20-21). First, we agree that a self-report measure of attention is suboptimal and that an ‘objective’ (i.e., device-based) measure would have afforded firmer conclusions about the role of attention. Second, the Attention-Readiness-Motivation framework indeed proposes that endogenous attention is a precursor of the impact of valuations but valuations are the proximal predictor of action. Our signage intervention simultaneously manipulated attention and valuation which makes it difficult to disentangle their effects. We point out that future studies should endeavor to manipulate attention and valuation in a factorial design to offer a stronger test of their individual and combined effects. 2. Study 2 Control Group Contamination: Not removing pre-existing signage in the control group threatens the study’s validity. This may have influenced the control group’s beliefs or behavior. Please discuss how this condition differs from a true baseline with no signage. We should have been clearer about the nature of the control condition and thank the reviewer for bringing this issue to our attention. We have added a new paragraph to the method section in Study 2 (p. 15) and deleted reference to the control condition in the discussion. The new paragraph indicates that the control condition qualifies as a “treatment as usual” or “usual care” control and we reference Freedland et al.,’s (2019) seminal analysis of choice of intervention comparators. We point out that the laundry room signage required by the Housing Authority remained in place and no additional signage concerning cold-water laundering was provided. Thus, in our control condition, the laundry room was the same as it would have been if no intervention was tested, and was equivalent to the physical setting tested in Study 1. 3. Low Normative Beliefs Scale Reliability: The reliability of the Normative Beliefs scale (α = .62) in Study 1 is low. Since the intervention used a strong normative message, this weak measurement may explain why you didn’t find an effect. Please note this as a limitation. We thank the Reviewer for this comment, as the lower scale reliability could indeed be one reason why normative beliefs were not correlated with experimental condition in Study 2 (r=.11). They were, we note, positively correlated with laundering with cold water, regardless of condition (r=.25). While speculative, another possibility for the lack of correlation between condition and normative beliefs is that the normative belief items focused on the importance or cleaning benefits of using cold water, whereas the normative message in the intervention was about fighting climate change. These different targeted normative beliefs may also explain the small correlation. We’ve noted the scale reliability as a limitation in the General Discussion on page 23. 4. Limited Sample Generalizability: Over 90% of participants in both studies were first-year undergraduates, who have little laundry experience. State clearly that these results mainly apply to novice groups. Thank you for this comment. We have addressed it by adding the following language to page 23, “First, it may limit the generalizability of the results due to the demographics of the sample. A majority of the participants (94%) in the intervention study were first year university students. It is possible that this sample was relatively inexperienced in laundering, and thus our findings may be limited to novice groups.” 5. Need to Separate Intervention Elements: Future research should break down the intervention package (arrow + three messages) to see if just the arrow or just the control belief message is effective, making the intervention more efficient. Thank you again. We agree with the reviewer and have addressed this point by adding the following language to page 23, “It was also the case that we were unable to decompose the influence of the two key components of our intervention – endogenous attention (i.e., the physical arrow and its placement) and psychological construct activation (i.e., the behavioral, normative, and control belief messages on the arrow). Factorial designs could be used in future research in order to formally test the relative, and interactive, influence of each.” Minor Grammar and Clarity Issues: page 11, line 233: Change to “The second was the self-reported question: ‘Which wash cycle did you select?’” We have revised this line to reflect the reviewer’s language above. Page 10, line 217: Change “cutout window” to “large viewing window” or “large pane-glass window.” We have revised this line to, “large pane-glass window.” Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ACCA Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0344049.r002
16 Feb 2026 Decision Letter - Jamil Afzal, Editor Promoting Energy Conservation through Attention Control and Construct Activation: A Field Test at a Campus Laundry PONE-D-25-45725R1 Dear Dr. Buzinski, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support . If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Jamil Afzal, Ph.D, Post Doc Academic Editor PLOS One Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->?> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available??> The PLOS Data policy Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** Reviewer #1: This has been revise and has become very good, I agree that the article was published in plos one. Good Lucky! Reviewer #2: The authors have successfully addressed all previous comments. I am satisfied with the revisions and accept the manuscript. ****** what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0344049.r003
Formally Accepted
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