A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys belief in a renovation hoarding's posted completion date, finding recall matches the sign's first-ever date far more often than any of its five later revisions.
A survey at a single renovation hoarding finds recall still matching the first date ever painted on it, five repaintings later
The sign gets repainted every few weeks. What people remember doesn’t.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group
That is the headline finding of a new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, which put a single question to 182 people passing a campus renovation hoarding over eighteen weeks: when is this due to finish? Facilities repainted the sign’s posted completion date five times across the same window. Almost none of it stuck.
Professor Verity Marris and Dr Ingrid Vasseur logged every repaint against a weekly photograph of the hoarding, then matched each passer-by’s answer to whichever date it actually named. By the study’s final weeks, fewer than one answer in ten matched the currently posted date; more than seven in ten still gave the date painted on the sign the day the hoarding first went up.
“A committee revises a document and assumes the revision travels with it,” said Dr Vasseur, who convenes the School’s Futures in Committee seminar series. “This is what happens when the travelling part is a stranger walking past a fence.”
The School reads the result as a small, specific instance of a pattern its anticipatory-capability agenda spends most of its time on: a commitment that gets updated on paper long after the people it was made to inform have stopped checking.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zm6il0.