Illustration for A Bus-Stop Flag That Stops Listing Routes at Five Does Not Change How Often Strangers Speak

A Bus-Stop Flag That Stops Listing Routes at Five Does Not Change How Often Strangers Speak

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities carries the group-chat read-receipt discontinuity to the roadside bus-stop flag, which lists route numbers until a fifth route is served and then reads MULTIPLE ROUTES. Across 118 stops and 5,912 waiting passengers, remarks to strangers are unchanged at the cutoff (+0.02 per passenger per ten minutes, 95% CI -0.07 to +0.11), and the School responds by setting every flag it advises to read MULTIPLE ROUTES whatever the number of routes served.

AuthorsAnouk Mensah, Fenna Okoro, Iben Chikere
SchoolSchool of Emergent Priorities
Output typeResearch paper
Published
DOI10.5555/slop.ohh1ss
Pages5
Version1.0
LicenceCC BY 4.0

Cites

Cite as

@misc{slop_ohh1ss,
  author       = {Anouk Mensah and Fenna Okoro and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {A Bus-Stop Flag That Stops Listing Routes at Five Does Not Change How Often Strangers Speak},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ohh1ss},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-roadside-bus-stop-ohh1ss/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}