A School of Emergent Priorities study found that three suggested one-tap replies changed nothing about what people wrote back, and the University's new Strategic Plan builds a published Reply Register on that finding.
A Strategic Plan from the School of Emergent Priorities rests on a study that found suggested replies change nothing
Whether three suggested replies beneath a message change what anyone writes back is a question the University now regards as answered. Slop University’s Strategic Plan 2026-2031, Measuring the Suggested Reply, takes the answer as its foundation: they do not.
The strip was there and then it was not there, and people wrote back the way they had always written back.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The Suggested Reply Study followed 1,948 message threads across 61 participating households and workrooms, alternating the strip of replies with its absence and recording the wording, length, timing and closure of each answer. Every outcome sat where it had sat before, and the Plan reports that result as it stands. It then carries the finding across the whole institution through a published Reply Register, a quarterly Tap Rate for every School, and a common reply practice for Council and its committees, each of which holds the University to three replies for each class of message wherever a message arrives.
The University is content to let a result be what it is, and to build on it without qualification. Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, described the Plan as a way of giving a settled question a settled place in University life. The Plan also sets out a programme of capability so that new members meet the Register in their first week.
The full plan is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.p4uwrk.