 I was looking at all the pronghorn scoring stats I could possibly dig up through the B&C Trophy Search. While looking through the B&C data on 3467 bucks (data was pulled from the site 6/21/2015) I noticed something peculiar. It seems as though B&C scorers have a strong bias toward measuring the length and prong in whole quarter numbers rather than in the smaller eighth increments. Of the 3467 bucks, 57.14% of the length measurements and 56.23% of the prong measurements ended in either 0/8", 2/8", 4/8" or 6/8". The odd eighth's of 1/8", 3/8", 5/8", and 7/8" occurred on only 42.86% and 43.77% of the trophies. I've attached the graphs of both of these occurrences broken down into right and left horns. In the charts it's easy to see the strange trend with the jagged lines.     What does it all mean? It means that B&C scorers may subconsciously fall into the trap of using even numbers. One reason for this, according to the studies that I've looked up, is that even numbers are more liked and are more easily added and subtracted.
Here's one of the articles I found: Why Odd Numbers are Dodgy, Evens are Good, and 7 is Everyone's Favorite Edit: I've decided there could be a couple more possibilities that I've overlooked that have nothing to do with psychology. 1. There could be a certain number of measurers who, for whatever reason, are using tape measures that only have quarter inch marks. I'm sure this isn't common, but it has to be a possibility given the evidence. 2. More likely than 1 is that there could be numerous scorers who have old tape measures that simply have been worn out over time. This could make the dashes on the 1/8 marks very hard to read and therefore easier to skip past when looking at the tape. There are probably other reasons I haven't considered as well. Does this affect anything with regards to scoring or field judging? I haven't decided yet. |