Poll: What Number Am I Thinking Of?

William is doing a little experiment for fun: he asked a bunch of kids at school to guess a number he was thinking of between 1 and 10 (inclusive), and he recorded their answers. He’s intrigued by the results, and wants a bigger sample size, and I said I could ask on the blog, so that brings you up to where we are today. I’m putting a poll over to the right. (Avoid looking at comments before you vote.) [Poll closed; see results below.]

37 thoughts on “Poll: What Number Am I Thinking Of?

  1. Bailey

    Not gonna lie. I picked my favorite number (8), but if I was going to pick the number I thought he was thinking of, I’d pick 3. But why? Whhhhyyyyy?!

    Reply
  2. Erin

    My guy said 7, but the answer is NEVER 7 when I guess these things, so I went with 6. Which is apparently a fairly middle-of-the-road answer. Not the most common, not the least common. I feel boring.

    Reply
  3. Guinevere

    My anecdotal experience with college students is that they nearly always pick odd numbers, and always avoid the extremes boundaries they’re given. (If asked to chose between 1-10 inclusive, they never ever pick 1 and 10, if asked to chose between 0 and 360, they avoid 0 and 360 and anything too close to those.)

    Reply
  4. Caitlin

    7!

    But…I think I was swayed by the first comment because I clicked the link from Facebook and it was the first thing I saw, before I read the post. If I might offer a suggestion, perhaps you could put some spaces in the post so none of the comments will be visible just yet?

    Love that he’s doing this!

    Reply
  5. Stimey

    That’s kinda freaky that so many of us said 7.

    Although I’m not going to lie, the first number that popped into my head was 12, so 7 was only second place.

    Reply
  6. Laura Diniwilk

    I tend to pick 7 if I’m just asked to pick a number, but avoid it if I’m asked to pick a number someone ELSE is thinking of, since everyone knows everyone picks 7 and the person asking would therefore be tricky and purposely think of something else. So I picked 3. My three year old picked 5 and hubs picked 7 if you want more data points.

    Reply
  7. Ms. Key

    I went with 7, and I always do when I pick between 1 and 10, haha. Hilarious! How interesting!

    I think it’s really need that so many here are also commenting that they’ve picked 3!

    Reply
  8. Unknown

    I actually have some data on this at home somewhere. A group of students in my statistics course did a similar study a couple of years ago. Let me know if you want me to send it to you. I don’t have a copy of the report anymore, unfortunately – that would have been really interesting for your son. It was an excellent report – the students came up with some intriguing research questions.

    Reply

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