A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities audits every game on a common-room shelf against its self-certified completeness card, finding certified-complete games still missing pieces at close to the same rate as games with no card at all.
A 34-game term-end audit finds the common-room shelf's self-certified completeness card tracks borrower trust, not the pieces
A tick on a laminated card and an actual count of a board game’s pieces turn out to be measuring two different things, a new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds. Every game on the Union Building common room’s shelf carries a card the last borrower initials on return, certifying the box complete against its own piece list. Nobody had checked whether the card and the box agreed.
Over a full teaching term, the team surveyed borrowers as they lifted a game off the shelf, rating how much they trusted its card before taking it. Once the term ended, all thirty-four boxes were counted twice, blind to their certification history, against each publisher’s own list — the first time the shelf’s paperwork and its actual contents have been reconciled. Borrower trust tracked a game’s certification closely; the audit did not. Games carrying a certified-complete card were still missing a median of two pieces, statistically indistinguishable from games with no card at all.
What we didn’t expect was how confidently people trusted a tick they’d never verified themselves. That’s the question we’d like the rest of the shelf to sit with.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Anouk Mensah, the poster’s co-author, said the finding fits a pattern the School keeps noticing in its own paperwork: “a label survives long after anyone has checked whether it still describes the thing underneath.”
The Office of Research Outputs is filing the result alongside a running tally of the University’s self-certifying systems, and says the shelf’s card will stay exactly as it is while a photographed lay-out check is trialled at return instead.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qeh57z.