This question has been bugging me for years, reinforced every time I park in a large parking lot.
I heard an interview with researchers reporting amongst their findings that on average people spend 45 seconds searching for their car in a parking lot" (or whatever the actual duration was).
Since hearing this, in every parking lot I’ve felt the eyes of phantom researchers watching me return to my car, stopwatch in hand. (I have a similar experience at the urinal after hearing queue-time studies measuring Z-to-P time by mounting hidden cameras inside urinals).
I may have misheard, but I’m pretty sure the duration was the time between “Now, just where did I park?” and “Oh, there” and not the duration from store door to car door.
How would I go about replicating this? More specifically, if I start my stopwatch when I see someone exit the store, how do I know when to stop it when they’ve found the car?
The best answer I can think of seems too imprecise: at some time a person’s course will become a straight line (adjusted for obvious collision-avoidance) - the beginning of that line being when they know the car’s location. If someone beelines straight from the store door the time is zero.
Perhaps you could try to determine how much “extra” time they spend getting to their car? Time their actual walk (including time spent standing still while they look around) and subtract the amount of time they would have went if they walked straight to the car (which you could figure from the distance and average walking speed).
Fit the person with EEG monitor, and a device that tracks eye movement. I don’t know exactly how it would work, but I’m certain that when the person sees their car and registers “Hey, there it is”, there would be some kind of readabale response.
And if I was setting it up, I wouldn’t tell them that it’s the car search I was evaluating. Just stick the apparatus on them for a couple days so their car search isn’t tainted.
Why not set it up so that you have them park and walk into a storefront (presumably they’ll walk directly) and then use that as the optimal speed? Extra time on the walk back would be roughly time spent searching, assuming the lot was relatively flat.
That sounds simpler than my idea, and variations in walking speed or parking lot traffic would average out in the end…
You’d have to keep track more carefully though, so you can match up the same person entering and leaving. Perhaps by recording something unique like the license plate, vehicle description, or the exact parking space.
Comparing entrance time to exit time is a really good suggestion. Further precision would come from controlling for any effect the shopping experience itself may have (fatigue, laden with bags) - which should be pretty straightforward.
I knew when I finally got around to posting this question y’all would come up with something. Thanks!
One complication I can see: People generally start walking in the right general direction before they actually spot the car. Does that time spent walking count, or is it only the excess time over the direct walk?
Chronos That’s along the lines I think every time I return to my car. If I have forgotten, I sometimes actually try to look confident and strike out in a general direction, just to confuse the watchers. Often I make it to the car without (I don’t think) giving the appearance I was ever in doubt - just to mess with their heads.
I’m not paranoid - which of my enemies told you this?
Prior to posting I was locked in the mentality that the watchers must detect something which clues them in to stopping the stopwatch. While not perfect, I can see that with a sufficient sample size a properly controlled measurement of the difference in entrance/exit times would at least measure “delay due to doubt” if not “time to a-ha”
Maybe that’s the best we can measure without consulting Winston Smith’s executioners.
Now, when you have replicated this study and collected all your data and written up your report, you can submit it right here to the Straight Dope Teeming Millions Peer Review Board for publication! There’s ignorance to be fought here!
The completely other approach is to recruit a bunch of volunteers. Give them stopwatches and ask them to go shopping, and when they come out, start the stopwatch, stopping it when they find their car.
This eliminates one big bunch of confounding things (walk more slowly after shopping because they’re tired, etc.) and adds some more (people are more self-conscious, etc.).
I think your choice partly depends on exactly what you’re trying to answer, and why.
Quercus is right, it depends on why you’re trying to measure what. I don’t recall those details from the interview. As Sicks points out the volunteer approach could influence the findings, but the effect may be within tolerance depending on the purpose of the study.
