And not everyone prefers cake to fruit in the first place, or even prefers a snack to no snack. But I looked up the original paperFruitOrCake.pdf) and they did actually test this, by giving participants a questionnaire after they had made their choice, about their thought processes as they did so and their attitudes to fruit and cake. From this they determined whether their decision “was driven more by affect than by cognitions”. Another of the variables they measured was the number of thoughts the subjects had as they made their decision. They also looked at the effect of presenting the choices by pictures of the real thing, or by the real thing itself (having first tested the pictures to ensure that they looked equally like the real cake and the real fruit).
Personally, I don’t take it seriously for a moment. I’m not going to attempt to persuade anyone else they shouldn’t, as that would take an intensive study of the whole paper and all of whatever subsequent work has been done to replicate it, and I’m not that interested. I just find it unlikely that such a trifling task—remembering either a single 2-digit number or a single 7-digit one—is going to have the effects claimed, let alone the flood of story that Kathy Sierra elaborates on the foundation of that experiment and another on dogs. The expressions that leap to my mind are “researcher degrees of freedom” and “story time”.
And not everyone prefers cake to fruit in the first place, or even prefers a snack to no snack. But I looked up the original paperFruitOrCake.pdf) and they did actually test this, by giving participants a questionnaire after they had made their choice, about their thought processes as they did so and their attitudes to fruit and cake. From this they determined whether their decision “was driven more by affect than by cognitions”. Another of the variables they measured was the number of thoughts the subjects had as they made their decision. They also looked at the effect of presenting the choices by pictures of the real thing, or by the real thing itself (having first tested the pictures to ensure that they looked equally like the real cake and the real fruit).
Personally, I don’t take it seriously for a moment. I’m not going to attempt to persuade anyone else they shouldn’t, as that would take an intensive study of the whole paper and all of whatever subsequent work has been done to replicate it, and I’m not that interested. I just find it unlikely that such a trifling task—remembering either a single 2-digit number or a single 7-digit one—is going to have the effects claimed, let alone the flood of story that Kathy Sierra elaborates on the foundation of that experiment and another on dogs. The expressions that leap to my mind are “researcher degrees of freedom” and “story time”.
I think there are plenty of people for whom remembering a 7-digit number is not trifling.