A new Slop University paper audits 163 children's birthday parties whose invitations asked for no gifts, finding gift-free arrival rates range from 33% to 58% depending on the wording and are unmoved by a reminder text.
A new paper audits 1,748 birthday-party arrivals and finds a charitable-donation redirect far outpaces a plain refusal, while a reminder text moves the rate hardly at all
Not every invitation that asks for no gifts means the same thing once the party actually happens, Slop University research published today finds. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits 1,748 guest-arrivals across 163 children’s birthday parties, cataloguing what turns up instead of a present when one has been explicitly declined — and finds that how often nothing turns up at all depends less on the instruction itself than on which four words carry it.
Ask a guest not to bring something and most of them will still bring you something. Ask them to redirect it somewhere specific instead, and a lot more of them actually will.
— Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe, Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The University treats the finding as one more entry in a ledger it keeps intending to close: how rarely a stated rule and an enacted one turn out to be the same rule.
Researchers tracked every gift-table arrival across four wordings in circulation among the families they recruited — a plain refusal, a softer appeal to presence alone, and a charitable-donation redirect — coding each non-compliant arrival into one of five recurring substitute forms. Gift-free arrivals ranged from a third of guests under the softest wording to well over half under the charity redirect; a randomised reminder text sent 48 hours beforehand moved the rate by less than the day’s ordinary variation.
“A reminder assumes people forgot,” said Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Convenor of Capability Sprints. “Ours mostly hadn’t. They just didn’t have anywhere specific to put the impulse.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vwdh9c.