A new Slop University research poster surveys 340 group-chat members on how long an unanswered message can sit before it counts as ignored, and the University adopts the family-chat figure as its own chat policy.
A population survey of reply-wait tolerance becomes the University's own fixed auto-escalation rule, no exceptions.
Every group chat runs on an unspoken deadline for how long a message can sit unanswered before it counts as being ignored. A new School of Emergent Priorities research poster puts a number on that deadline for the first time, surveying 340 chat members across family, friend, and work-team threads — and finds the deadline depends entirely on which chat you’re in.
Led by Senior Lecturer Fenna Okoro, Convenor of the Horizon Register, with Dr Petra Umbile and Dr Ingrid Vasseur, the team fielded a single self-report item to an opt-in panel quota-sampled across the three chat types, asking each respondent how many hours a sent message could go unanswered before it stopped feeling like an oversight. Work-team threads cluster tightly under four hours; family and friend threads spread past a full day, with a long tail past that.
A grace period is a kindness right up until someone writes it down and applies it to everyone at once.
— Senior Lecturer Fenna Okoro, Convenor of the Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
“The Indicator Commons didn’t ask us for a policy,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Convenor of Futures in Committee. “It asked for a number, and a number was what the survey had.” The Indicator Commons has since adopted the family-chat figure — 18.6 hours at the 75th percentile — as the University’s single default auto-escalation threshold across every internal group chat, with no per-channel override.
The School counts the figure among its clearest translations yet of an ordinary courtesy into an enforceable standard.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8qjm2n.