Psychophysical study of numbers

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to study the number biases of subjects in situations not involving the usual psychophysical stimuli. In Exp. I subjects were asked to generate numbers (within boundary conditions) they thought other people would produce under the same conditions. In Exp. II only a single lower boundary (e.g., 1,10 or 100) was employed and subjects generated a set of numbers larger than the boundary. Results suggested that definite number biases exist. Multiples of 1, 10, 100 and to a lesser extent 5, 50 and 500 dominate and are appropriate to the log cycle. That is, multiples of 1 occur most often in the cycle 1–10, multiples of 10 in the cycle 10–100, etc. The implications of these results are noted for several psychophysical theories.