However, my mental model of an average NPR contest participant without any feedback from others is that of a one- or two-leveler (people rarely spend a lot of time thinking about poll answers).
I would be interested in knowing the values of the individual votes, perhaps after the poll is ended. In particular, I'm curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five - what would you call that, a zero-leveler? I guess someone who picked a number higher than fifty would be a negative-one-leveler.
In particular, I'm curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five - what would you call that, a zero-leveler?
I played this game twice before; once with a high-school group and once with a collegiate. Based on those, I would be totally not surprised if a non-trivial number of people picked numbers between 50 and 100. Note that they are not picking 100 for trolling value but rather some 2/3-ish sounding number, like 70. They constitute the "not-quite-grasping-the-game-mechanics" group.
NPR's Planet Money is running an experiment which could be an interesting way to test your other-people-modeling skills.
This is a guessing game. To play, pick a number between 0 and 100. The goal is to pick the number that's closest to half the average of all guesses.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/03/133654225/please-help-us-pick-a-number?sc=fb&cc=fp
The other people guessing are self-selected, I would assume primarily NPR listeners.