Response availability and the apparent spontaneity of numerical choices.

Abstract

When asked to report the digit that comes to mind, 28.4% of the respondents chose 7 and only 2.2% chose 1. In contrast, when asked to report the one-digit number that comes to mind, 18.0% of the respondents chose 1 and only 12.1% chose 7. Further experiments studied this phenomenon of response enhancement by availability. It is shown that if the digit 1 is mentioned by the experimenter as an example of a response, its frequency is much lower (5.4%) than when it is unobtrusively used by the experimenter in the instructions (18.0%). Another experiment shows that if the first four-digit number that comes to mind is requested, the frequency of 4 as the initial digit is 27.4%, whereas if the first number between 1,000 and 9,999 that comes to mind is requested, the frequency of 4 as the initial digit is only 4.3%. Together with Kubovy and Psotka's findings, these results indicate that subjects initially make a bona fide attempt to comply with the request for a spontaneous response. If the result does not look sufficiently spontaneous, an apparently spontaneous response is deliberately generated.