The first time I saw the data, I did not believe it.
I was in a hotel room in Vienna — where else — reading through research papers late at night. I had fallen down another of my characteristic rabbit holes, this time starting from a casual mention in Banachek’s work about population stereotypes. The term sounded clinical, academic, distant from anything I would care about as a performer. But the data behind it was anything but clinical. It was staggering.
When you ask a group of people to name a number between one and ten, roughly twenty-five percent of them will say seven. Not ten percent, which is what you would expect if choices were random and evenly distributed across ten options. Twenty-five percent. One in four people gravitates to the same number. And this is not a quirk of one particular study. It has been replicated across cultures, across decades, across different experimental conditions. Seven is the overwhelming default.
When you ask people to name a playing card — any card at all, from the entire deck of fifty-two — twenty-five percent choose the Ace of Spades. Another fourteen percent choose the Queen of Hearts. Six percent choose the Ace of Hearts. Six percent choose the King of Hearts. That means fifty-one percent of all choices — more than half — fall on just four cards. Out of fifty-two possible options.
I sat there in my hotel room doing the math and feeling something between astonishment and giddy disbelief. Half the population, when given completely free choice from fifty-two options, clusters on four of them. This is not a small effect. This is a massive, systematic, predictable bias in how humans make “free” choices.
Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes document these findings in their research on the psychology of forcing, and the data changed everything I thought I knew about what “free choice” actually means.
Why Seven?
The question that immediately grabbed me was: why? Why seven? Why not five, which is right in the middle? Why not three, or eight? What makes seven special?
The honest answer is that researchers do not have a single, definitive explanation. But several factors converge to make seven the default number in this range.
First, seven is perceived as the most “random-feeling” number. People who are asked to pick a number often unconsciously try to avoid numbers that feel too obvious or too patterned. One and ten feel like endpoints — too predictable. Five feels too middle. Even numbers feel too structured. That leaves the odd numbers in the interior of the range: three, seven, and nine. Of these, seven has the strongest cultural resonance (seven days in a week, seven wonders of the world, seven as a lucky number) while simultaneously feeling psychologically distinct — not too low, not too high, not too central.
Second, there is a cognitive fluency factor. Seven is easy to think of, easy to say, and comes to mind quickly. In the System 1 framework from the previous post, seven is the default because it is the most cognitively accessible number that also feels sufficiently “random.” It satisfies two competing constraints simultaneously: be quick (System 1) and avoid being obvious (an aesthetic preference that does not require System 2 engagement).
Third, there is social learning. We hear “seven” in the context of luck, games, and randomness throughout our lives. When asked to produce a random-seeming number, our brains retrieve the number most strongly associated with randomness and luck — which is seven.
The result is a powerful statistical regularity. Not a certainty — seventy-five percent of people choose something else — but a strong enough tendency to be extraordinarily useful.
The Card Data
The playing card data is even more striking than the number data because the choice space is so much larger. With fifty-two options, random distribution would put any single card at about a two percent probability. The Ace of Spades comes in at twenty-five percent. That is more than twelve times the expected rate.
Why the Ace of Spades? It is the card with the strongest cultural identity. It is visually distinctive — in most decks, it has the largest, most elaborate pip design. It is associated with power, finality, and significance (the “death card” in military history, the featured card in countless films and songs). It is the first card most people think of when they think of playing cards at all.
The Queen of Hearts, at fourteen percent, carries similar cultural weight — the character from Alice in Wonderland, the association with love and emotion, the visual distinctiveness. Together, these two cards account for nearly forty percent of all “free” choices from a fifty-two-card deck.
One finding from the research that surprised me: men choose the Queen of Hearts more frequently than women do. This runs counter to what you might expect — that people would gravitate toward cards that match their own gender identity. But the data is clear. The Queen of Hearts has a cultural pull that operates independently of the chooser’s gender.
What This Means for a Performer
I want to be careful here, because this post is about the psychology, not about specific techniques. But the implications of population stereotypes for anyone who performs mentalism or any effect involving spectator choices are worth thinking through.
The first implication is probabilistic, not deterministic. A twenty-five percent hit rate on a single guess sounds low, but it is dramatically higher than chance. And population stereotypes combine with other psychological factors — priming, context, framing — to increase those rates further. The base rate is the floor, not the ceiling.
The second implication is about perceived freedom. And this is the part that blows my mind every time I think about it. Spectators who choose seven, or who name the Ace of Spades, feel absolutely, completely free. They do not feel guided. They do not feel influenced. They experience their choice as a genuine, spontaneous expression of personal preference. The idea that twenty-five percent of the population would make the same “personal” choice strikes them as absurd.
This gap — between the objective predictability of the choice and the subjective experience of freedom — is the psychological space in which mentalism operates. The spectator feels free. The statistics say otherwise. Both things are true simultaneously. And the performer who understands this gap can work within it ethically and effectively.
Stability Across Cultures
One of the things that impressed me most when I dug into this research was how stable these stereotypes are across different populations.
You might expect that cultural factors would produce dramatically different results in different countries. And for some choices, cultural variation does exist — color preferences, word associations, and symbol meanings vary across cultures. But the number stereotype (seven) and the card stereotypes (Ace of Spades, Queen of Hearts) show remarkable consistency across Western cultures and significant consistency globally.
This matters for me practically because I perform primarily in Austria but occasionally at international events. Knowing that these stereotypes travel well gives me confidence in structuring interactions for audiences from different backgrounds.
That said, I am careful not to over-rely on any single stereotype. The twenty-five percent figure means that three out of four people will choose something else. At a table of six people, the expected number who would choose seven is about one and a half. Not a majority. Not even close. Population stereotypes are a powerful starting point, but they are not a guarantee.
The “Pick Something Unusual” Effect
There is a fascinating wrinkle in the population stereotype research that deserves its own discussion. When you explicitly tell people to pick something unusual — “choose a number between one and ten, but try to pick something other people would not choose” — the distribution shifts, but it does not flatten.
People who are trying to be unusual tend to avoid seven (because they suspect it is common) and gravitate toward less obvious numbers. But they do not spread evenly. They cluster on new defaults — often three or nine. The attempt to be unpredictable creates a new layer of predictability.
This is a deep insight into human cognition. We are not very good at being random. Even when we try to be unusual, we are unusual in predictable ways. Our attempt to escape the pattern creates a new pattern. System 1 cannot generate true randomness, and System 2’s attempts to override System 1 are constrained by their own biases.
I experienced this firsthand at a private event in Klagenfurt. One of the guests was a mathematician — the kind of person who knows about cognitive biases and population stereotypes. When I asked him to think of a number between one and ten, he smiled and said, “I know about seven.” Then he deliberately chose something else. But his “something else” was three — the second most common choice in the “try to be unusual” condition. His attempt to escape the pattern landed him squarely in the second-most-popular pattern.
That moment taught me something important: awareness of a stereotype does not automatically free you from it. It just shifts you to a different (and equally predictable) response. This is because the stereotype is not a conscious decision in the first place. It is a System 1 default. Consciously overriding it requires System 2, and System 2’s override is itself constrained by biases.
Building Intuitions Over Data
When I first learned about population stereotypes, I wanted to memorize every data point. The exact percentages. The second and third most common choices for every category. The cultural variations. I approached it like a consultant building a market analysis — all data, all the time.
But over months of performing, I found that the data was less useful than the intuition I developed from observing real spectators in real situations. The research told me that twenty-five percent of people choose seven. My experience showed me what that looks like in practice — the speed of the response, the confidence in the delivery, the total absence of deliberation.
I started keeping informal mental notes after performances. Not rigorous data collection — I am a performer, not a researcher — but general impressions. Which choices came up most often? When did someone surprise me? What were the conditions when a stereotype held versus when it broke?
Over time, those impressions built into something more useful than any single statistic: an intuitive sense of how likely a particular choice is in a particular context. Not a number, but a feeling. This person, in this setting, with this energy, is going to go with the default. Or: this person is going to try to be clever.
That intuition, built from hundreds of interactions at events across Austria and beyond, is now one of the most valuable tools I have. It is not infallible. It does not replace preparation or technique. But it gives me a real-time read on the psychological landscape of a given moment that no amount of academic research could provide on its own.
The Bigger Picture
Population stereotypes reveal something uncomfortable about the nature of free will, or at least about the nature of the choices we experience as free. When a quarter of the population makes the same “free” choice, it challenges our intuitive sense that our decisions are uniquely ours.
This is not an argument against free will. It is an observation that free will operates within constraints — cognitive constraints, cultural constraints, contextual constraints — that make our choices far more predictable than we realize. We feel free because we are unaware of the constraints. The constraints are invisible precisely because they operate at the level of System 1, below conscious awareness.
For me, this realization was humbling in two directions. As a performer, it was empowering — understanding these constraints gives me tools to create experiences that feel impossible. But as a human being making my own “free” choices every day, it was a reminder that I am just as constrained as my spectators. When I choose a restaurant, a route to work, a word to describe something, I am drawing from the same well of defaults and stereotypes. My System 1 is no different from theirs.
That dual perspective — the performer who understands the constraints and the person who is subject to them — keeps me honest about what I do and why it works. Population stereotypes are not a flaw in human cognition. They are a feature. They make our lives manageable by reducing the infinite space of possible choices to a manageable set of defaults. Without them, every decision would require the full engagement of System 2, and we would be exhausted before lunch.
Performers did not invent these patterns. They discovered them. And the discovery, confirmed by decades of rigorous research, reveals something fundamental about how human minds work — something far more interesting than any single effect could be.
Twenty-five percent choose seven. And they always will.