Different Factors That Affect Choices in the Game of Rock-Paper-Scissors

Overview

In this study, I will look into two aspects of the game of Rock -Paper-Scissors, including how age and sex affect the first move choice and the conditional responses of previous round results. Beginning this process, I looked at different papers studying th e game to get an idea of what to expect and how to perform my research. I played 55 matches against people of various ages and genders to get a wide variety of people in my sample. I used an AI -coded website to help track the data from each round and saved it all to a spreadsheet to make graphs and tables to help display my results. My null hypothesis was that neither age or gender played a role in first move choice, and that there was no conditional response to winning, losing, or tying. Using chi -square tests I failed to reject the null hypothesis for age, and after winning or tying, however, I found a relationship between gender and first move and between losing a previous round and the type of next move (upgrade - switching to the move that would beat the previous one, downgrade - switching to the one that would lose to it, or none - keeping the same move). After finding the relationships, I was able to construct 95% confidence intervals for the most frequent choices in these scenarios: females choosing sc issors first ( 0.3487, 0.6799 ), males choosing rock first (0.232, 0.668), and people upgrading after losing (0.4547, 0.6804).

Competition history

• JSHS 2025 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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