For the last few days, Fauxlowers.com has been running a secret mind control experiment. Muahahahahahaha! Here’s a chart showing the results:

What the chart shows is the fauxlower thresholds for new members joining the site recently. (A fauxlower threshold is the number of people our members believe a person can follow on Twitter before it becomes impossible to keep up with their tweets).

The complete graph includes a few dots up into the millions (I could show math to prove that many of our members are…dare I say it?…just plain wrong about what’s even remotely possible, but that’s not my point today). I set the upper limit to 10,000 to make it easier to see what’s happening.

Starting at the red line, I added code to the signup form that suggested a number for our new members’ fauxlower thresholds. I didn’t want to make it too unreasonable, so I had it randomly select either the median threshold (250) or the average threshold (1,324 — I ignored ridiculously high thresholds that would have skewed the results).

As you can see where the arrow is pointing, a lot of people started accepting the suggestion of 1,324. 250 also became more popular, though the change was less noticeable.

Other than the 1,324 line, what do you notice about the left and right sides of the red line in the image? Clearly, 1,324 cannibalized a lot of other numbers. What’s most striking is that almost every member who would have entered a number between (but not including) 1,000 and 10,000 (plus many who would have entered numbers as low as 500) simply accepted 1,324!

Why? And why didn’t 250 cannibalize the numbers surrounding it nearly as much?

Here’s what I think: 1,324 is not a round number. So I imagine some members either thought there was a good reason for that number or were confused by it, decided they weren’t sure what they were supposed to enter, and just accepted it. 250 is a round number, so it was more likely seen as a suggestion to be followed or ignored rather than a number that was entered for a concrete reason.

If you’re a student of copywriting, you’re probably familiar with the fact that non-round numbers are usually considered more trustworthy than round numbers. For example, a headline saying “I made $5,973.27 is one day!” would probably convert better than one saying “I made $6,000 in one day!” because the precision suggests that the person actually added up the exact amount earned rather than either guesstimating or simply making up a fake number.

If you want to influence opinion (or skew the results of a poll…not that you should!), use non-round numbers.

Oh, and yes, I’ve turned off the experiment. The fauxlower threshold field comes up blank till the member enters their own freely-chosen number.