Think of a number between one and ten. Was it seven? The odds are that it was seven.
If the public’s collective imagination were truly random, then we would have expected each of the numbers from one to ten to have been chosen by approximately 10%. Instead, however, the results of a micro-YouGov study show that fully a third of Britons (33%) pick the number seven.
This finding was consistent on two separate surveys – one asking respondents to write their number down, and the other asking them to pick it from a list (the results of using the first methodology are the ones shown).
Additionally, respondents are also more reluctant to choose the numbers at the extreme ends of the scale: one, two, nine and ten.
This is not the first time such an observation has been made. Indeed, there is a psychological phenomenon known as a the ‘Blue-Seven’ phenomenon which posits that the majority of people choose blue and seven when asked to come up with a colour and single digit number – although it is not known why. Previous YouGov research has also shown that across the world the largest number of people pick blue as their favourite colour.
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