percentages, pee & a hopefully broader application

What a great few days! The family gathered, celebrating a milestone birthday for our youngest, joy-filled son, feasting and frolicking and simply having fun together!

One of our activities included multiple, most competitive rounds of  “Guesspionage,” the survey percentage guessing game from Jackbox TV. 

Players are asked a human condition question. One player then enters a number between 0% and 100%. The others then wager whether the actual survey result is higher or lower than that player's guess, Points are awarded based on how close your percentage guess is to the real data (collected through online polls by Jackbox Games).

The questions range all over the place. For example (and these are fun to personally guesstimate), here are a creative dozen Q’s..,

1. What percentage of people have peed in a public pool?
2. What percentage of people wink primarily with their left eye?
3. What percentage of people most often use toilet paper to blow their noses instead of tissues? 
4. What percentage of people wear socks when they sleep at night?
5. What percentage of people never invite a date home if their living space is messy?
6. What percentage of people normally do NOT greet their neighbors using their first names when passing them?
7. What percentage of people exit parties via an "Irish goodbye" (leaving without telling anyone they are taking off)?
8. What percentage of people are not at all pleased by having a surprise party thrown for them?
9. What percentage of people are annoyed more than anything else when a Mariachi band suddenly appears?
10. What percentage of people believe that the U.S. government has performed alien experiments at Area 51?
11. What percentage of people have actually buried something in the woods?
12. What percentage of people prefer waffles over pancakes?

Respectfully, the answers above are: 

1. 53%
2. 38%
3. 35%
4. 16%
5. 14%
6. 63%
7. 25%
8. 9%
9. 40%
10. 44%
11. 42%
12. 51%

(So forgetting for a moment that #1 creeps me out a bit…) After engaging in the game as a family and finding ourselves surprised multiple times, we came to a broader, most insightful application…

We tend to conclude that we are in the majority. 

We are genuinely surprised when the majority of others don’t think like us. 

When, for example, we learned that the clear majority of Americans have owned a cactus and yet there’s never been one dead or alive in our household, we were indeed surprised. How could so many be so different?

What a fascinating question...

(Now please stop peeing in the pool.)

Respectfully…

AR