A School of Emergent Priorities research poster surveys 245 shoppers at eighteen supermarket and strip-mall entrance noticeboards and reports the University committing any site whose guessed-versus-logged divergence clears nine days to a mandatory date-stamp.
A survey of 245 shoppers at eighteen supermarket and strip-mall noticeboards found guessed flyer age tracking a board's clutter, not the shop's own removal log, and the University now wants a date-stamp where the gap is largest.
Every entrance noticeboard runs on the same unspoken arrangement: flyers go up, flyers eventually come down, and nobody outside the shop keeps track of when either happened. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities has now asked the only people who actually look at the board.
Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities, working with Dr Fenna Okoro, intercepted 245 shoppers across eighteen supermarket and strip-mall entrances over an eleven-week window, asking each to guess how long a specific flyer had been pinned up. Every guess was checked against the shop’s own removal log, and the flyer’s position on the board was recorded alongside it. Guesses clustered tightly around “just gone up” and “ages”, almost never anywhere between, and tracked a flyer’s crowded or bare surroundings far more closely than its logged age.
People aren’t reading the paper. They’re reading the noticeboard around it.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register, said the gap ran widest at sites where the board itself was most cluttered, and narrowest at the few kept down to a bare handful of notices.
The School of Emergent Priorities is reading the result as licence to act on a gap it had only ever suspected: from next term, any noticeboard whose guess-to-log divergence clears nine days will carry a mandatory date-stamp, checked at every Horizon Register visit.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sxywcg.