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Cognitive sychologists study this kind of question, as you might expect. Here's a paper (behind a paywall, sorry) where they asked people to name random digits. You don't get uniform distribution on 0,..,9.

I learned a little about this stuff when I was writing a blog post about detecting election fraud by looking for digits which looked more like "numbers made up by humans" than "numbers arrived at randomly."

Update: I spoke to my colleague Gary Lupyan, a cognitive psychologist here who studies such things. There are lots of interesting results, although he hasn't done the precise experiment suggested in the question. If you ask people to name a number between 1 and 100, the modal responses are between 1 and 10, with maybe a slight continuing dropoff afterwards. People disprefer even numbers and multiples of 5 and 10. He also replicated the folk belief that if you ask people to name a number between 1 and 20, the modal response is 17.

It doesn't look to me like the results he's getting are well-modeled by any particularly natural distribution, though you could certainly fit some kind of decay to it.

Cognitive sychologists study this kind of question, as you might expect. Here's a paper (behind a paywall, sorry) where they asked people to name random digits. You don't get uniform distribution on 0,..,9.

I learned a little about this stuff when I was writing a blog post about detecting election fraud by looking for digits which looked more like "numbers made up by humans" than "numbers arrived at randomly."

Cognitive sychologists study this kind of question, as you might expect. Here's a paper (behind a paywall, sorry) where they asked people to name random digits. You don't get uniform distribution on 0,..,9.

I learned a little about this stuff when I was writing a blog post about detecting election fraud by looking for digits which looked more like "numbers made up by humans" than "numbers arrived at randomly."

Update: I spoke to my colleague Gary Lupyan, a cognitive psychologist here who studies such things. There are lots of interesting results, although he hasn't done the precise experiment suggested in the question. If you ask people to name a number between 1 and 100, the modal responses are between 1 and 10, with maybe a slight continuing dropoff afterwards. People disprefer even numbers and multiples of 5 and 10. He also replicated the folk belief that if you ask people to name a number between 1 and 20, the modal response is 17.

It doesn't look to me like the results he's getting are well-modeled by any particularly natural distribution, though you could certainly fit some kind of decay to it.

Source Link
JSE
  • 19.2k
  • 6
  • 69
  • 134

Cognitive sychologists study this kind of question, as you might expect. Here's a paper (behind a paywall, sorry) where they asked people to name random digits. You don't get uniform distribution on 0,..,9.

I learned a little about this stuff when I was writing a blog post about detecting election fraud by looking for digits which looked more like "numbers made up by humans" than "numbers arrived at randomly."