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I just used google....google is everyone's friend. Pulled from various forums.
"I think it might be a psycholinguistic pattern problem. Thinking 6 sends the signals to the mouth to form the sounds necessary to say it whether you do or not. The word six has the same hard consonant as the beginning of the word carrot, and prepares the mouth and the mind to use that particular sound. And it would make it mostly an English thing that way.
The people who don't come up with carrot are probably people who for whatever reason have chosen a favorite vegetable, or eat a particular vegetable much more often than carrots. Or, in the case of potato, they are Irish. They have potato in their DNA.
Another one is to have a person do a series of calculation adding up to 14: 7+7 12+2 10+4 15-1 21-7 etc.. Then ask them to name a vegetable. Chances are they will name a carrot. From experience I know it's pretty hard NOT to say carrot! This only works for native English speakers or someone extremely fluent in English, however. When you do this with someone it helps to assure them you are not trying to trick them with math. Otherwise they ponder too long before answering '14', which is obviously the correct answer to ALL the problems. You have to get them to do it semi-automatically.
Hammer is a most commonly used tool. Google count for the word hammer is about 3 million as opposed to 0.5 million for the wrench and screwdriver. Red is the most commonly referred color (google about 60M compare to 40M for blue or green). It means a large chunk of population, something like 30% (not 98%) is going to choose the "red hammer" simply because it's the most common combination. Some large number is going to choose just red or just hammer, getting a "close" answer. Those who guess correctly, forward the message, those who don't discard it. Thus, then you get the message it has a long history of "right" guesses making you believe that there is something to it. But in reality is just a rule of big numbers."
--djway
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