The question: which of these statements about animals is false:
A. The flying fish is a fish
B. The horned toad is a toad
C. The Siberian tiger is a tiger
D. The whale shark is a shark.
The contestant didn’t know. Her +1 (the new in-person version of Phone a Friend) didn’t know. So she asked the audience…
72% said D. 15% had the correct answer (B)
Possibly the most overwhelmingly wrong response from an audience ever.
Well, i got it right, but only through a process of elimination.
I’ve never seen a horned toad/horned lizard in the wild, and i also didn’t grow up in the US so it wasn’t a part of my childhood lizard-hunting activities in Australia. If someone had asked me what a horned toad was before today, i probably would have said it was a variety of toad.
But i did know that the flying fish is a fish, the Siberian tiger is a tiger, and the whale shark is a shark.
It’s not so much that only 15% had the right answer, but that 72% jumped on the same wrong answer.
To give the audience the benefit of the doubt, they were probably stricken with dyslexia simultaneously, and read D backwards: the whale shark is a whale.
It doesn’t seem like an easy question to me either. I would have pick D. Never heard of a whale shark.
So a horned toad isn’t a toad. Thats news to me. I guess its a lizard then?
It’s actually a drink of some kind. Tequila, maybe?
Yosemite Sam, “Great horny toads!”…ring a bell?
Horned lizard. The mascot of Texas Christian University, btw.
The link describes the Texas Horned Lizard, but I know that there is a species of horny toad in California.
Whale shark.
And I just noticed that this link uses the word “mammal”, twice. Boneheads.
LMGTFY - Horned lizard - Wikipedia
That is odd that so many got it wrong. Most around the southwest US should know this one. Looks like the show is filmed in CT.
I don’t know why this is surprising to you.
Of the four options, this was the only one that had an alternative animal in the actual name. Leaving aside any prior knowledge of the particular animals in questions, it’s completely understandable that people would gravitate towards the answer that explicitly contains a sort of contradiction.
I think a lot of people picked D because they didn’t pay careful attention. I almost picked D when I read the list because I know that the whale shark is not a whale and I didn’t read carefully.
On the one hand, yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, when up to a million dollars could be at stake, seems like you would want to pay careful attention.
For the record, I knew that the whale shark was, not only a shark, but the largest species of fish currently living (and that whales are not fish). I also knew that the horned toad (aka horny toad, horned frog, or horned lizard) was a type of lizard (and the TCU mascot).
For the audience, there wasn’t anything at stake except warm fuzzy feelings of having been right.
As a long-time viewer, I can attest that the audience response tends to fall into 3 kinds of distribution: one overwhelming correct response (a no-brainer for everyone except the contestant); one response with a slight edge (a tough question); and evenly distributed (nobody has a clue).
To see an overwhelming vote for a single wrong answer hardly ever happens, which is why we’re here.
Not having seen the episode, did the contestant in her musings about the answer suggest that she was leaning to ‘D’? That might have gotten the ‘not sure’ types to break in favor of D.
(I recall an ‘advice for game show contestants’ thread mentioning that if you plan to poll the audience in ‘Millionaire,’ never hint about which you’re leaning before asking.)
Wow! When I used to watch a CONSENSUS audience answer was Never wrong!
Precisely! The “ask the audience” thing is a pretty good example of Wisdom of Crowds. Usually.
I wish I remembered more of the specifics so I could Google this, but I don’t. I remember right around 2000, a guy polled the audience, and the majority of the audience was leaning towards one answer, but the contestant didn’t think that was the right answer. So he asked for 50/50, and the two choices he had were the one that the majority of the audience picked, and the one that the smallest percentage of the audience voted for (as in, out of all four answers, it was the least picked one).
The contestant ended up picking the answer that not many people voted for, and got the answer right. So it has happened before. On the other hand, the reason I still remember that episode so many years later is precisely because the incident was so rare.
(If anyone else remembers this and can provide more specifics, I’d appreciate it!)
It is a complete waste to use an Ask the Audience on a question for categories like science or classical music. They are ok for things like movies, pop music or who some celebrity is married to but it’s stupid when they blow an Ask the Audience if they have other lifelines they could have used.
Usually all the answers score about even and you get to see that look of letdown on the contestants face, but it is surprising how decidedly wrong they got this one.