People are generally bad at producing random actions, but now it seems that we are all uniquely bad in our own way. This makes it possible to predict how an individual will act randomly, which could have implications for data security and choosing suitably strong passwords.
Psychologists already know that we struggle with randomness 鈥� ask people to name a random colour, and , while the between 1 and 10 is 7.
To understand if this failure at randomness varies across individuals, at Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues asked 143 people to randomly select numbers from 1 to 9, and separately to choose one of nine boxes displayed in a three-by-three grid. For each task, the participants had to make a total of 250 random choices.
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The researchers found they could use a computational model to predict the supposedly random choices of boxes based on that person鈥檚 choice of numbers, and vice versa. Roughly a year later, when participants were asked back to repeat the tasks, the researchers could still predict their choices. Only 53 of the original participants were able to be included in the final analysis, which showed that the聽model was around 10 per cent more accurate at predicting the supposedly random selections made 12 months on than chance guessing.
鈥淲e found that using someone鈥檚 year-old data, we could predict what they鈥檙e doing, both within a task, and across tasks,鈥� says Boger. 鈥淲e were all really surprised just how stable these behaviours were over time. It鈥檚 showing this really rich, idiosyncratic behaviour across people.鈥�
鈥淭his suggests that our minds contain a process of randomness generation which we tap into when producing 鈥榬andom鈥� sequences,鈥� says at the University of Dundee in Scotland. 鈥淏ecause this process is stable over time and tasks, if we know someone鈥檚 random decisions at one point in time, we may be able to predict their 鈥榬andom鈥� decisions in the future.鈥�
This isn鈥檛 necessarily surprising, says at University College London, as the choices are likely to reflect individual differences in cognitive executive control, or the ability to control your information processing and behaviour. For instance, to not say something negative when you instinctively want to involves exercising your cognitive executive control.
However, what is surprising is that the purported randomness can be identified to individuals and over time. Benwell points out this could have significant implications, both in terms of trying to predict how people react in areas such as game theory, but also in the small details of our lives.
鈥淭his could potentially render human-generated passwords, data encryption and/or exploration patterns more predictable than we would hope,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t is important for us to be aware of this so that we can avoid being predictable when we don鈥檛 want to be, potentially by offloading such decisions to non-human hardware.鈥�
PsyArXiv
