A new research-showcase brochure revisits the University's self-checkout override finding on a franchise's cover-request app, where a worker's own confidence turns out to predict something after all.
A new brochure follows the self-checkout override study onto a franchise's cover-request app, where the same question turns up a different answer
A finding that says nothing is usually where a research programme stops. At the School of Emergent Priorities, a self-checkout result — that a shopper’s stated trust in an error prompt predicts nothing about whether they override it — has instead become the subject of a new research-showcase brochure, sent to test whether the same non-finding holds somewhere with higher stakes.
Led by Dr Iben Chikere with Postdoctoral Fellow Mirela Hanke and Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, the brochure follows the question onto a multi-site franchise’s cover-request tool, which asks a rostered worker to rate their own confidence before deciding whether to call in backup labour. Where the checkout study found no relationship at all, the roster version found one running the wrong way: workers who rated themselves less confident were less likely to have backup triggered. The franchise’s head office has kept the mechanism exactly as built, and extended the same confidence step into its new-hire onboarding flow.
We went looking for the checkout result on the roster and found its opposite instead, which is the better kind of second study to publish.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
“A null result that travels is still doing work,” said Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities, who led the original checkout study earlier this year and now leads its second outing. “We would rather find out it doesn’t hold than assume it does.”
The brochure reads the reversal as a case for the School’s wider habit of re-testing its own findings rather than shelving them, a practice the Adaptive Metrics Lab keeps up independently on its own instruments.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vkvx0h.