That time Mr. Beast did a paired t-test

1. I assure you, your traditional college-aged students know who Mr. Beast is.

2. If you don't know who he is, just Google him.

3. His real name is Jimmy so that's what I'll call him for the remainder of the post because while I respect his work and can't handle writing/referring to an adult human who isn't a wrestler as Mr. Beast again. Anyway, Jimmy shared, via Twitter (it is still Twitter) that he had done some A/B testing on his clips. A story in two Tweets.

https://twitter.com/MrBeast/status/1699460698726613343

https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1699460698726613343?s=20

This story made the rounds because Mr. Beast is such a famous YouTuber. How can you use this example in class?

1. Introduce A/B testing, and how some of the techniques used by professional statisticians are actually pretty straightforward application of basic statistics tests (here, paired t-test).

2. Conduct a paired t-test: I made up some pretend data that imitates these findings.

3. Review the parts of a paired t-tests. IV: Smile vs. no smile. DV: Seconds spent viewing the video.

4. YouTube content creators may seem to prioritize content, lolz, etc., but a lot of the executive decisions about what videos to post have to do with what people are watching and how they watch the videos. That is all data. Yes, there are already data analytic firms just for influencer data. It is a job.

5. Depending on the kind of psychologist you are and what you teach, you could get into Duchenne smiles versus non-Duchenne smiles, the uncanny valley, etc.

Comments

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