Miracle of Marshmallows

Today in Experimental Economics with Professor Holt, we were asked to guess how many marshmallows were in a box and the person closest to the number won the amount of marshmallows in pennies. I was way off, only guessing around 400, but the rest of the class overestimated, with some guessing around 1500. The number in the box was 1250 and although our median was around 700-800, it was cool to see the attempt of having the miracle of aggregation on something as trivial as marshmallows.

Caplan shows us that the reason for the miracle of aggregation straying from the median voter is due to systematic biases such as the pessimistic bias, make work bias, anti-foreign bias, and anti-market bias.

I tried to think of some biases as to why the miracle was not so miraculous in our class and I came to the conclusion that there were a couple of biases that us students could have suffered from. Those being, like me, in the back corner of the room so we do not have a good view of the box, another being that there was only five minutes left of class and people were probably thinking about the next activity in their day.