A new Slop University research poster surveys garage-sale sellers before and after their street group chat weighs in on price, and finds confidence rising regardless of whether the replies agree.
A pre/post survey of 118 sellers finds confidence rising after the street chat responds, whether its replies agree or not
A number becomes yours the moment somebody else has weighed in on it, whether they agreed with you or not.
— Lecturer Iben Chikere, School of Emergent Priorities
That’s the working theory behind a new Slop University research poster, which surveyed 118 garage-sale sellers across nine street and apartment-block group chats over one spring selling season, rating how sure each felt about a posted price just before the chat replied and again once it had.
Lecturer Iben Chikere and Dr Anouk Mensah tracked that swing against how tightly each chat’s replies actually agreed. It made no difference: sellers reported high confidence in their price at close to the same rate whether the chat converged within a few dollars or scattered across a wide range, and a separate check found no relationship between that confidence and how close the eventual sale landed to the number posted.
“The next version tests what happens when the chat replies with an actual counter-offer instead of just an opinion,” said Dr Anouk Mensah. “Right now it doesn’t seem to matter what gets said back, only that something does.”
For the School of Emergent Priorities, the result adds a tidy entry to its running account of how a settled figure picks up company on its way to becoming final, whether or not the company agreed with it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4kt8gy.