
arXiv: 2310.04153
Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. We collected $350{,}757$ coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery (DHM; 2007). The model asserts that when people flip an ordinary coin, it tends to land on the same side it started -- DHM estimated the probability of a same-side outcome to be about 51\%. Our data lend strong support to this precise prediction: the coins landed on the same side more often than not, $\text{Pr}(\text{same side}) = 0.508$, 95\% credible interval (CI) [$0.506$, $0.509$], $\text{BF}_{\text{same-side bias}} = 2359$. Furthermore, the data revealed considerable between-people variation in the degree of this same-side bias. Our data also confirmed the generic prediction that when people flip an ordinary coin -- with the initial side-up randomly determined -- it is equally likely to land heads or tails: $\text{Pr}(\text{heads}) = 0.500$, 95\% CI [$0.498$, $0.502$], $\text{BF}_{\text{heads-tails bias}} = 0.182$. Furthermore, this lack of heads-tails bias does not appear to vary across coins. Additional analyses revealed that the within-people same-side bias decreased as more coins were flipped, an effect that is consistent with the possibility that practice makes people flip coins in a less wobbly fashion. Our data therefore provide strong evidence that when some (but not all) people flip a fair coin, it tends to land on the same side it started.
FOS: Computer and information sciences, History and Overview, Physics, History and Overview (math.HO), Other Statistics (stat.OT), FOS: Physical sciences, stat.OT, Other Statistics, Chance, Informed hypothesis, physics.data-an, Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability, math.HO, FOS: Mathematics, Bayesian model-averaging, Randomness, Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an), Work, Health and Performance, Probability
FOS: Computer and information sciences, History and Overview, Physics, History and Overview (math.HO), Other Statistics (stat.OT), FOS: Physical sciences, stat.OT, Other Statistics, Chance, Informed hypothesis, physics.data-an, Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability, math.HO, FOS: Mathematics, Bayesian model-averaging, Randomness, Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an), Work, Health and Performance, Probability
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