Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner

When asked to randomly select answer choices on easy multiple choice questions, people select more correct answers than expected by chance. Sparrow and Wegner showed that this tendency was eliminated if participants answered questions correctly before answering randomly. They argued that answering a question correctly unprimes the tendency to choose the correct answer, thereby reducing the correct response rate close to the chance level of.5. An alternative explanation, consistent with these results, is that answering questions correctly provides a baseline, which allows participants to strategize, i.e., to match and mismatch equal numbers of their purportedly random responses to the baseline response. Three studies showed that the presence of a baseline, even when unpriming is not feasible, led to lower correct response rates than those obtained in a condition in which no baseline was available. Furthermore, the presence of a baseline led to more nonrandom sequences of correct and incorrect responses. One specific sequence–alternating correct and incorrect answers–mediated the relation between the presence of a baseline and lower correct response rate. These findings suggest that strategizing, not unpriming, accounts for Sparrow and Wegner’s results.