Where do people go? Though it’s a simple question, scholars disagree about where people choose to go to the toilet. What specifically concerns these scholars is a small aspect of the larger puzzle. When you give someone a choice of several, say four, toilet stalls arranged all in a row, which stall do people choose to use?
In the past 40 years, there have been two major experimental studies on this topic. The results of one directly contradict those of the other. The first, in Antarctica, discovered that people prefer the stalls at the ends. The other, in California, found people prefer the middle stalls….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.