A School of Continuous Improvement poster replicates an earlier honesty-placard finding on a shire's self-certified fire-hazard clearance return, and the self-correction effect does not reproduce.
A replication finds the honesty-placard line that lifted pub-trivia self-correction moves nothing once a fine, not bragging rights, sits behind it.
An honesty nudge that once moved how often pub-trivia teams corrected their own scores has just met a form with a fine attached, and it did not survive the trip. Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard in the School of Continuous Improvement, led a replication of the University’s placard-line finding on a shire’s self-certified fire-hazard clearance return, working with Dr Solveig Adeyemi.
The team printed the same honesty-nudge wording that once ran above a pub’s phone bucket onto half of 244 self-certified clearance returns issued across one shire’s clearance season, then checked a subsample of ninety-six properties against an inspector’s independent finding. Where the original placard lifted voluntary self-correction of submitted scores from roughly one in thirty trivia teams to one in seven, the printed line on the compliance return moved almost nothing, and self-report concordance with the inspectors held exactly where the original design had left it.
A scoreboard makes an inflated number embarrassing. A fine makes an accurate one expensive. The nudge was never going to survive that swap.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
“The line didn’t move the number, so now it’s a fixture on the form regardless,” said Dr Adeyemi. “That’s the part of a compliance instrument nobody plans for: the bit that keeps running after the trial that justified it has already returned a null.”
The result lands as a straightforward null rather than a discovery, which the School of Continuous Improvement’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda treats as data in its own right: the honesty-nudge line stays on next season’s clearance return by shire decision, with a second monitoring wave to follow.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gshr8s.