A new Slop University research poster surveys 214 active geocachers about why they withhold a maintenance flag on a container they themselves rate poor, finding reluctance to lower the cache's find rate for other seekers the most cited reason and under-reporting rising with a finder's own streak length.
A survey of 214 geocachers finds a maintenance flag is the first thing dropped when logging one would cost a find streak
Not every indicator is read off a sensor. Some are simply what a person was willing to click, on a form nobody checks. A research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities asks what a geocacher clicks when the container in front of them is falling apart.
Surveying 214 active geocachers, the team asked what a finder does with a container they rate poor. 58 per cent logged it as a standard find. The most common reason offered, when a reason was offered at all, was reluctance to be the one who lowers the cache’s find rate for other seekers.
A health indicator that only updates when someone volunteers bad news about themselves is not really an early-warning system. It is a compliment the last visitor decided to pay the next one.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
Dr Anneke Tolan, who studies how foresight practices scale from pilot settings, said the streak effect “reads like every informal workaround this School has catalogued elsewhere: the shortcut survives because reporting the truth costs the person telling it something, and nobody built in a way to pay that cost back.”
The team fielded an eighteen-item survey through a regional caching forum and an in-app prompt, asking finders to recall their most recent poor-condition find and explain, in their own words, why they logged what they logged. Free-text answers were coded independently by two readers working blind to the respondent’s own streak length.
For a School built on stewarding indicators, a crowd-maintained health score with no incentive to speak up is exactly what it means to keep watching.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.10u9y9.