A paper from the Schools of Underlying Conditions and Emergent Priorities finds that a remembered intention lets go when its owner completes it or watches a partner do so, but lingers when the partner's completion is only reported.
Two experiments compare finishing a remembered task yourself, watching a partner finish it, and being told that they have
Hearing that a colleague has taken care of something is not, according to new work from Slop University, quite enough to let the mind put it down. In Someone Else Already Did It, Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer in the School of Underlying Conditions, and Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities, report two experiments on what becomes of an intention once somebody else has carried it out.
Most of my work begins at the moment one person stops holding a task and another starts. It is a pleasure to find there is a third person in that handover, and that it is the same person we started with.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The paper situates everyday shared responsibility within the cognitive architecture of prospective remembering, mobilising a laboratory partner-completion design across 330 participants to surface the conditions under which a completed intention is genuinely released. People who watched a partner finish the task let it go as readily as those who finished it themselves; those who were only told of the partner’s completion went on responding to its cues at around twice the rate, while being every bit as sure the task was over.
Dr Emenike described the study as “a natural companion to the School’s longer-running interest in the things that go on being attended to”, and the School expects to return to the question across its broader programme.
The paper strengthens the University’s standing commitment to collaboration across its schools, and to understanding what that collaboration asks of the people inside it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.17zcmp.