What do you want?



NO!  Not the cartoon!

 

As a recent student in a simulation class, I experienced a very interesting lecture about peanuts.  We were asked if we liked peanuts or not. We were asked what kind of candy bars we liked and what kind of ingredients in those candy bars did we prefer.  We were asked, if given a choice, would we want candy bars that had no peanuts, just a few, more than just a few, many more than just a few or fully loaded with peanuts.

These peanuts . . .

While our class size offered a small size and the data collected was simply not scientific, we did discover that there was clearly no winner among the choices we had been given.

We were asked about our favorite candy bar and how many peanuts we thought that candy bar had inside.  We were all amazed that our favorite candy bar did not match the amount of peanuts that we thought we wanted inside.

We were asked to select and retrieve candy from a bowl that was being passed around that contained samples of all the candy bars that we had indicated were our favorite plus some that we did not mention.  By the time the bowl got to me, my favorite was gone so I selected one that I did not really want but ate it just like all the other students in the class.

The entire exercise took about 20-30 minutes to complete. 

While our results varied widely, what all of us did discover was that what we thought we wanted did not match what we wanted and we were willing to accept a substitute if what we thought we wanted was not available.

Was this little research experiment a reliable predictor of the whole?

Was it 99.7% accurate where 2600 out of 1,000,000 would show other results?

Was it 99.9999997% accurate where 1 to 3 out of 1,000,000 would show other results?

Does the accuracy matter at all because in a class of 20, 100% of us were wrong on what we thought we wanted even though our tastes varied substantially?

I personally think the irony is very funny since the more educated we become, the less we truly know about ourselves and about each other.  So, are our expectations really being met or are we being told what our expectations are or should be?

How many peanuts

do you want in your

favorite candy bar?