A new Slop University research poster tests a supermarket loyalty scheme's confirmation-step null result on council development-application objections, and finds the requirement collapses objections instead of leaving them unchanged.
A shire's development-application objection slip, tested against a supermarket loyalty finding, cuts objections by two-thirds inside three months.
A confirmation tap, Slop University found only weeks earlier, can be added to a supermarket loyalty reward without changing who claims it. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities carried the same design somewhere the reward is a neighbour’s formal say: a shire’s development-application objection register.
Led by Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist with Dr Ingrid Vasseur and Dr Mirela Hanke, the team tracked fourteen shire planning offices through the staggered rollout of a signed confirmation slip, now required before a written objection is entered on the public register. Objections lodged per hundred notified properties fell by two-thirds within twelve weeks of each office’s rollout date, concentrated almost entirely among residents objecting for the first time.
A confirmation step that does nothing to a shopping habit turns out to do quite a lot to a democratic one.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
The University reads the divergence as proof its own findings don’t travel on request. “The planning office logs the slip’s return, not the objection underneath it, so a friction effect and a satisfaction trend look identical from the dashboard,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard. State planning guidance has since extended the confirmation-slip requirement to every future development-application notification, with no review of the fall before the requirement became permanent.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.n6h5x4.