However, my mental model of an average NPR contest participant without any feedback from others is that of a one- or two-leveler (people rarely spend a lot of time thinking about poll answers).
I would be interested in knowing the values of the individual votes, perhaps after the poll is ended. In particular, I’m curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five—what would you call that, a zero-leveler? I guess someone who picked a number higher than fifty would be a negative-one-leveler.
I’m curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five—and what would you call that, a zero-leveler?
Actually, a sizable fraction of clever pranksters may get a kick out of thwarting the “rational” choice, since there is no punishment for guessing wrong, and pick 100.
This thought did occur to me, yes. But I figured the “rational” choice—which is not actually rational, since it’s predictably not going to win—of zero was doomed anyway, so chose 1 rather than guarantee a loss with 100 for no purpose.
Edit: Oh. There’s nothing preventing you from voting multiple times. Hmm… in that case 49 is probably the best bet.
In particular, I’m curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five—what would you call that, a zero-leveler?
I played this game twice before; once with a high-school group and once with a collegiate. Based on those, I would be totally not surprised if a non-trivial number of people picked numbers between 50 and 100. Note that they are not picking 100 for trolling value but rather some 2/3-ish sounding number, like 70. They constitute the “not-quite-grasping-the-game-mechanics” group.
I would be interested in knowing the values of the individual votes, perhaps after the poll is ended. In particular, I’m curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five—what would you call that, a zero-leveler? I guess someone who picked a number higher than fifty would be a negative-one-leveler.
Actually, a sizable fraction of clever pranksters may get a kick out of thwarting the “rational” choice, since there is no punishment for guessing wrong, and pick 100.
(No, I am not telling you what I picked.)
Every time I’ve played this in real life there’s been someone who’s done that.
This thought did occur to me, yes. But I figured the “rational” choice—which is not actually rational, since it’s predictably not going to win—of zero was doomed anyway, so chose 1 rather than guarantee a loss with 100 for no purpose.
Edit: Oh. There’s nothing preventing you from voting multiple times. Hmm… in that case 49 is probably the best bet.
I played this game twice before; once with a high-school group and once with a collegiate. Based on those, I would be totally not surprised if a non-trivial number of people picked numbers between 50 and 100. Note that they are not picking 100 for trolling value but rather some 2/3-ish sounding number, like 70. They constitute the “not-quite-grasping-the-game-mechanics” group.