A School of Emergent Priorities replication tests the University's bin-night streak-chart finding across forty kitchens, and the self-protecting divergence returns only in the six households where an unbroken streak unlocks screen time.
A forty-kitchen replication of a single-household bin-night finding recovers the effect in six kitchens, all of them running a screen-time incentive.
A measurement effect discovered in one kitchen has just been tested in thirty-nine more, and it mostly disappeared. Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey in the School of Emergent Priorities, led a forty-household attempt to reproduce an earlier Slop University finding: that a household’s bin-night streak chart begins protecting its own record once something rides on keeping it unbroken.
Working with Dr Marek Solheim and Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Adegoke’s team fitted forty kitchens with a compost-caddy streak chart and an independent bin-sensor log, then attached a Saturday screen-time privilege to the streak in twenty of them partway through the twelve-week trial. In the twenty households without the privilege, and in fourteen of the twenty with it, the chart and the sensor agreed to within a week throughout. In the remaining six, the original divergence reappeared almost exactly.
A chart that agrees with the sensor in thirty-four kitchens has stopped being interesting. The six where it doesn’t is where the actual work starts.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities
For a School whose founding instrument treats the gap between claim and practice as data, a chart correcting its own bias in most households is not a setback; it is the dataset. The Strategic Drift Survey has not treated the six-household result as a footnote: any privilege-linked household streak chart the School registers is now classed as a monitored instrument, due an annual sensor audit for as long as the arrangement continues.
“These are the six households worth watching,” said Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, “and the Survey intends to keep watching them.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9fa5i0.