A Slop University paper surveys 1,614 households nationally on who decides whether last night's dinner is still good, finds wide and sometimes bimodal variation in how long the role lasts, and proposes a household rotation standard from the results.
Decision confidence falls with household size, and a new stability index flags a handover before it happens
Most households have one: someone who opens the container, considers it for a moment, and decides. A national survey released today by the School of Emergent Priorities gives that person a name — the leftovers arbiter — and a population-level account of how confidently they decide, how often another household member overrules them, and how long they typically hold the job before it passes on.
Doctoral candidate Sunniva Balogun led the work with Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register, and Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, surveying 1,614 households nationally and following a subset for six weeks to see who still held the role. The survey extends the School’s ongoing effort to find early warning in decisions nobody is currently watching.
The households who told us how this actually works are the ones who’ll recognise themselves in the numbers, not the argument.
— Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
Confidence in the arbiter’s call fell as households grew larger, and role tenure varied far more than a single average could show: in family households, some handovers came within days, others not for the better part of a year. A printed kitchen guide, tested against a control group, changed neither confidence nor how often the call was challenged.
“What the tenure figures gave us wasn’t a typical household,” said Dr Okoro, “it was a signal for which households sat closer to a change than they realised.” On the strength of that signal, the Horizon Register is adopting the survey’s national median as a model nine-day rotation for the role, published without exception for a household whose own arbiter has held the job far longer.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.os31xd.