Picture yourself entering a public restroom, which stall do you select in a public bathroom? Do you immediately head to the stalls farther away from the entrance that appears reasonably clean and hopes for the best? If you do, you are not the only one. But what if you could take the guessing game out of this dilemma?
When it comes to public restrooms, people tend to skip the first stall or choose the middle one because of the “centrality preference” and to have a little more privacy. But you might want to rethink your stall-selection strategy after this.
According to the preferences of men and women survey from New York Magazine, a majority of both men and women prefer the middle stall. But since the stalls and urinals in the line are “rarely truly identical", men then show a preference for the stall or urinal closest to the door, while women tend to select those farther from it.
In 1995, a study by Psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld was conducted regarding stall use. He tracked how often the toilet paper was changed in each of the four stalls for 10 weeks. The results showed that 60 percent of finished rolls came from the middle stalls and 40 percent came from those at the ends. This shows that far more people used the stalls in the middle than random probability might anticipate.
Well, looking forward to which toilet stall should you use if you are particularly looking to use the cleanest one? In conclusion from the above research, the first stall in a female bathroom is generally the least often used and that means that it is the cleanest and contains the lowest bacteria levels, vice versa if you are male. The middle one is the best to avoid altogether if you are concerned with hygiene.