Do you ever feel like leaving a particularly tough decision up to a coin-toss? Here you can do precisely that and make a contribution to science: www.freakonomicsexperiments.com.
Of course this is not at all in line with my own approach to tackling difficult decisions! BUT… I am a sucker for cool experiments, and this one strikes me a quite brilliant. You tell the researchers what your decision is (narrowed down to two options), they flip a virtual coin for you, you do what the coin tells you to do, and the researchers and follow up later to find out how that worked out for you.
I looks like a lot of people have already participated in the coin flip. I imagine the main problem will be that many participants will not follow through with the option that the coin chose for them, or won’t respond to the follow-up questions, and whether they do or not will not be independent of what the coin chose for them. But no experiment is flawless, especially not one that tackles such real-life questions outside the lab.
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