Many people said they had chosen 9 specifically to dick with the results. I guess people figured 1 would be over-represented on its own.
I would have reckoned 1 would have dicked with the bell as much as 9. Pretty much, if we switch the numbers around in your post, it’d seem equally likely and plausible to me. But apparently not…
Unless I’m missing the point of the exercise, wouldn’t simply asking everyone “pick a number” be a better way to yield a bell curve. At the very least, you might figure out a general behavior bias.
Perhaps, but it is more interesting to see what people pick when they know the goal is to make a bell curve. To me, anyway.
Maybe everybody who’s participated so far was thinking, “Oh, wow. There will probably be at least 1000 other votes. I’d better make a case for these outlier numbers that nobody will mention. Surely everybody will be picking 4, 5, and 6.”
How close will this ever get to 1000 players, you suppose?
I agree that it is interesting. But as we’ve seen, you get individual biases that get into the results such as trying to be different, not knowing what a bell curve is or what it represents, etc.
That’s the point.
I picked 3 because I figured people would be picking the middle and ends a lot.
I probably should have picked 4 or 6, because it seemed like a lot of people had the same thought as me.
Why would that produce a bell curve? If everyone had used a truly random method such as dice to pick a number, that would have produced a flat line (all possibilities about equally likely to be chosen). Since the OP specifically asked for choices to yield a bell curve, the best number to choose is 5.
I picked 3 because I figured it should be within 2 of the middle, and I thought that more people would pick to be above average than below and I wanted to counteract that assumed bias.
Not true.
3d6 produces a bell curve in the long term. Always. Unless the dice are loaded. You have less than a 0.5% chance of rolling a 3 or an 18.
You have around a 12.5% chance of rolling a 10 or 11.
Only if you roll one die you have a flat line.
Oh, I getcha. I’d thought you meant something like using d6 in a way that simulates a single d9. Yes, if you’re rolling any dice multiple times it tends to a bell curve; we had a thread about that not that long ago.
It looks a lot like a Chanukkah menorah turned on its side.
To paraphrase a popular expression: “That bell won’t ring.”