The Mindful Occupant: The Effects of Mindfulness on Environmental Real Estate User Behaviors at Home and at the Office

In literature, large performance discrepancies have been found for comparable buildings. Moreover, often a large gap between predicted and actual building performance has been observed. The underlying reason for these phenomena is in many cases user behavior. Buildings may have become more efficient, but user behavior can easily offset potential efficiency gains.User behaviors have been and still are puzzling researchers. A key question remains how individual factors like knowledge, awareness or attitude relate to behaviors; commonly known as attitude-behavior gap. Anecdotal findings suggest that mindfulness is associated with closing this gap. Mindfulness is usually defined as an enhanced awareness of and attention to what is currently taking place. It may be important to disengage individuals from automatic thoughts, habits, and behavioral patterns. Mindfulness may facilitate behaviors which are consistent with one’s attitudes, values, and beliefs. This paper investigates the effects of environmental awareness and mindfulness on environmental real estate user behaviors at home and at work.A pre-test study has been conducted among students and evaluated with structural equation modeling. Preliminary findings revealed that mindfulness positively affects environmental awareness as well as environmental behaviors at home and at work. Other sustainable consumption patterns positively affect environmental behaviors as well, suggesting that “green” individuals also behave accordingly in buildings. Additionally, the context seems to influence behaviors, since environmental real estate user behaviors can be rather observed at home. One possible explanation is that occupants do not pay for utilities at the office. Nevertheless, the results imply that until environmental real estate user behaviors become the societal default, their enactment depends on mindful and environmentally aware individuals. In a next step, a study using a representative sample of the German population will be conducted to test for support of the findings.The contributions of this article are twofold. Firstly, it is one of the first articles to assess whether the same individual behaves differently depending on the context. Secondly, the article contributes to the existing literature in the field of building energy and water conservation by offering evidence that mindfulness as well as environmental awareness affect environmental real estate user behaviors.