upFront ezine: Number 6 Psychology
Monday, March 31, 2008 at 01:49PM
Joel
Number 6 Psychology
by Gordon Rigg

. . . . .Ask a group of people to pick a number between 1 and 10 (without them knowing each other's choice) and the most popular number will be 6, by a surprisingly big margin. Most folks don't want to seem extreme (by picking close to 1 or 9,) and somehow the middle number seems boring, and a bit higher than middle seems upbeat rather than depressed, and so 6 is the popular choice.

So no surprise that 6 is the number chosen by bored people all at the same stage in their lives, eager to impress their friends but still wanting to "fit in" with the others.

Sounds good doesn't it, and it may even turn out to be true. But I made it all up. Unlike engineering, popular psychology is easy!

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Article originally appeared on Joel Orr's World of Technology|CADCAM|PLM (http://joelorr.squarespace.com/).
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