A new Slop University paper interviews 22 residents across nine share houses that adopted a chore-tracking app, finding the whiteboard roster it replaced remains the more trusted record, and tracing why in five recurring themes.
A thematic interview study of 22 residents finds the legacy chore roster stays more trusted than the app that replaced it, and traces why
Nine share houses adopted the same kind of chore-tracking app, and none of them took the whiteboard down afterwards. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities set out to interview residents about the switch and came back with something closer to a second, unplanned system: the app scheduling and reminding, the whiteboard quietly kept on as the record a dispute still gets settled against.
A plan tells you what a household intended. The board on the fridge tells you what actually happened, and residents trust the second document more than the first.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Tolan and Dr Iben Chikere interviewed 22 residents across the nine houses, coding the transcripts to a five-theme account of what the whiteboard offers that the app apparently doesn’t: a visible record of who wrote or crossed out an entry, a spot in the kitchen nobody can mute, and a faint residue of past weeks the app’s single current screen doesn’t keep. A same-session trust rating backed up the interviews, and a check on whether the app’s push notifications were switched on made no difference at all to how much residents believed it.
“The nine houses never sat down and divided the labour between the two systems,” said Dr Chikere. “The app took the reminders and the board kept the record, and nobody had a meeting about it.”
For a School that spends most of its attention on foresight documents and review panels, the study is a smaller-stakes rehearsal of the same standing question: what a plan is trusted to say, set against what residents already know a scuffed-up wall can prove.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.z52rhp.