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  • Bartoš, František; Sarafoglou, Alexandra; Godmann, Henrik R; Sahrani, Amir; David Klein Leunk; Gui, Pierre Y; Voss, David; Ullah, Kaleem; Zoubek, Malte J; Nippold, Franziska; Aust, Frederik; Vieira, Felipe F; Chris-Gabriel Islam; Zoubek, Anton J; Shabani, Sara; Petter, Jonas; Roos, Ingeborg B; Finnemann, Adam; Lob, Aaron B; Hoffstadt, Madlen F; Nak, Jason; de Ron, Jill; Derks, Koen; Huth, Karoline; Terpstra, Sjoerd; Bastelica, Thomas; Matetovici, Magda; Ott, Vincent L; Zetea, Andreea S; Karnbach, Katharina; Donzallaz, Michelle C; Arne, John; Moore, Roy M; Assion, Franziska; Riet van Bork; Leidinger, Theresa E; Zhao, Xiaochang; Adrian Karami Motaghi; Pan, Ting; Armstrong, Hannah; Peng, Tianqi; Bialas, Mara; Pang, Joyce Y -C; Bohan Fu; Yang, Shujun; Lin, Xiaoyi; Sleiffer, Dana; Bognar, Miklos; Aczel, Balazs; Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

    arXiv.org, 06/2024
    Paper, Journal Article

    Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study 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 exploratory 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. Our data provide compelling statistical support for the DHM physics model of coin tossing.