The Tyranny of Round Numbers

Did you celebrate when your rating passed 1000? 1200? 1500? 2000?

How about when you reached 1493?

Certainly we've all noticed our tendency to pay special attention to round-number achievements. I've been a long-distance runner for many years, and there has always been enormous weight given to records like the four-minute mile or, more recently, the two-hour marathon.

I mulled this over today, as I'm training for a half-marathon and my goal is to break two hours. Today I ran 13.1 miles in 2:00:15 and thought "If I had only run a couple of seconds faster each mile." But then I wondered why the round two hour mark was so important.

After a little research, I discovered this is a well--documented phenomenon called round number bias. Researchers discovered that many more baseball players finished a season with a batting average of .300 or just over than finished with .299 or just under. A much higher percentage of men on the dating site OK Cupid list their height at 6 feet than exist in the general population. And the graph above shows the incredible difference between marathon runners who finish just under 4 hours compared with those who finish just over.

Of course, this is human nature and hard to combat. I can get as obsessed by round numbers as anyone. But we should be careful not to let round number bias ruin our enjoyment or our other-than-round-number achievements. Going from a 920 rating to 956 is a much greater accomplishment than going from 998 to 1000.

Maybe we can all spend less time worrying about numbers at all. I see a lot of people posting on the forums about how nervous they get before a match. I understand. My method, just before I hit that button, is to say to myself, "Here goes another lesson!" Thanks to that analysis button, you can learn something from every game — win, lose or draw. The hard truth is that YOU are the only one who really cares about that rating number. Face an opponent who's really on his or her game, and your rating goes down. Face someone who gets a phone call just before a crucial move, or spills coffee on himself, and it goes up.

None of it matters unless you come away knowing something you didn't before. So let's have some fun out there. It's only a game, after all.