Ever since Google popularized the concept of 20% time, where employees can spend one work day per week dabbling in non-core work, apparently every software engineer in the world now thinks they’re entitled to it. So, a couple of our brilliant CMU savants had the earth-shattering idea yesterday of analyzing the critical differences in how people play the legendary game Rock, Paper, Scissors.  As you can see, 1,623 poor souls were subjected to answering the following question in the past 24 hours:

Most people pick rock when playing rock, paper scissors

Clearly, Rock is the most commonly-used tactic in this highly-strategic game, followed by Scissors, then Paper was a distant third. Somehow 29% of Americans have never played the game.

We looked more deeply, however, and found that the tactics varied slightly by gender, where women were 21% more likely to choose Scissors. Men were more likely to pick Rock. See below.

Rock, Paper, Scissors by Gender. Women pick scissors

Then, we looked at the results by Party ID. While the day’s raw sample was tilted somewhat Republican, it is clear that Republican voters were also more likely to choose Scissors than people of other parties.

Rock, Paper, Scissors by political affiliation

Last but not least, we looked at the respondents’ favorite broadcast TV network. For some reason, people who watch CBS are most likely to pick Rock. People who watch NBC and Fox are more likely to pick Scissors. People who don’t watch network TV are most likely to pick Paper.

CBS fans pick rock in a game of Rock, Paper Scissors

Congratulations. You may now be dumber for having read this.