"Quick - Think of a colour and a tool..."
It seems pretty unanimous that the reason this "works" is because Red is usually the color people think of first, and Hammer is the first too. It also seems pretty unanimous that nowhere near 98% of people answer "red hammer".
This page has a discussion from a linguist.
http://thelanguageguy.blogspot.com/2005/04/fun-linguistic-internet-scam.html
This blog post was also interesting.
http://www.dx13.co.uk/articles/2006/4/1/433---The-98--2--Email.html
My personal theory is that additionally once Red is in the mind, some people will then jump to Hammer easily because of the Russian Hammer and Sickle (and who thinks of a Sickle?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_and_sickle
The best page of responses was this one:
http://theintentionexperiment.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=848178%3ATopic%3A8244...
A
Sending it around brought much more than a 2% different answer. So 98% is not correct; I'd guess more like 60% red hammer, 40% something different. These are not abnormal people but very creative, engineers, artists, etc. Their brains obviously have something different about them in order for them to succeed in their professions.
ReplyDeleteI am design engineer, but i think red hammer tooo...I thinks it near 90% people will get red hammer..
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