The Price of a Secret

On November 9, 2016, the morning after the election, an artist named Matthew Chavez walked into the subway under 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City with a few pads of sticky notes and some pens. He set up a small table, put a few notes on the white tiled walls, and invited commuters to write whatever was on their mind.

By the time Chavez’ experiment ended in mid-December, roughly 20,000 notes – jokes, apologies, pep talks – covered the station. The New-York Historical Society archived over 5,600 of them.

That story answered a question I’d been stuck on for weeks.

I’ve always wanted to design a survey that feels less like a form and more like an experience. So in September, I built a virtual hallway: a long corridor with high ceilings that paid survey respondents entered and walked through. The problem is I needed to give people something to do in there, and I had nothing.

Chavez’ project gave me the answer: leave a sticky note secret.

Last week, I paid 100 people to enter the virtual hallway. At the far end, above two big doors, a sign read: “Pass through these doors to complete the survey.”

Each side wall had its own sign: “Sticky Note Secrets,” with a smaller line underneath: “Leave a secret, concern, or thought, if you’d like.” Respondents could walk up to a wall, pull a note off a virtual pad, write anything, and stick it up.

Or they could walk through the doors and leave. Writing was optional.

If you want, you can explore the hallway right now. Or you can look at the images below.

I paid each person 50 cents. The walk to the doors took about 20 seconds, so anyone who went straight there earned roughly $90 an hour. Every second at the wall pushed that rate down. Anything people wrote, they wrote for free.

To the extent this was an experiment, that’s what I was testing: would anonymous internet strangers take a pay cut to share a secret?

I was in the hallway during the experiment. That might be malpractice – the researcher isn’t supposed to wander around inside his own experiment – but then again, Chavez didn’t watch his wall from across the station. He sat at a small table in the tunnel, handing out sticky notes.

I screen-recorded the whole thing. Here are the first 20 minutes, sped up.

When I analyzed the respondents' behavior, I found that 49% left a sticky note. The median time spent in the hallway was two minutes and seven seconds. Only three respondents walked almost directly to the exit, traveling the minimum possible distance and spending about 15 seconds in the hallway.

At the other extreme, one respondent spent just over 15 minutes in the hallway. Their movement data suggests they were actively exploring: they approached the walls 12 times, opened the sticky-note editor twice, canceled once, and eventually submitted a note that read, “God is AMAAAAZING!!!”

A few others showed similar patterns, spending up to 10 minutes exploring the hallway before leaving notes of their own.

What did people actually write?

The 49 sticky notes were a mix of personal confessions, encouragement, jokes, and opinions. Some were serious (“I'm an alcoholic,” “My father is dying”), while others were playful or reassuring (“You are enough”). Most were short: the median typed note contained just seven words.

Despite being invited to share a secret, relatively few respondents actually did. Many seemed more interested in leaving a message for strangers than revealing something about themselves.

There was also evidence of conversation. One person wrote, “I dont like my dog,” and another followed with, “I don't like his dog either. I'm a cat person.” (Seven notes mentioned dogs or cats, six of them among the first ten submissions.) Another respondent replied to an earlier note about eating worms and playing in the mud.

Here are images from each wall. Click on either one to enlarge it.

What does this mean for surveys?

The obvious application for something like this is market research. Turn the hallway into a supermarket, put products on shelves, and ask respondents to go shopping. I'm skeptical. Just because something looks more like a real shopping experience doesn't mean people will behave more like real shoppers.