There is an anonymous vote. You can press either the red button or the blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If fewer than 50% do, only those who pressed the red button survive.
anonymous vote · one attempt
One-Button Dilemma
People are given a button. Everyone who presses it will die if fewer than 50% of people press it. Would you press the button?
anonymous vote · one attempt
Some of you may have noticed that these are actually two identical situations. Yet because they are worded differently, people judge them very differently. In the one-button version, the wording sounds basically suicidal, so of course nobody presses it — except KDE users on FreeBSD.
But in the original version — with the blue and red buttons — most people not only vote for the blue button, but also strongly urge others to do the same. Their reasoning is that someone will clearly vote blue by accident or out of carelessness, and that there will be many such people, so they absolutely have to be saved. And it is hard to disagree with them.
I added a bit more fuel to the fire and created this page with A/B testing: the questions are shown in different orders. The difference in the results is easy to predict. It is a pity not everyone will vote seriously, because then we could see just how strongly wording affects people’s choices.
This is a fairly popular topic among online warriors, so take a look at this pile of persuasive weaponry:
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