According to Sean Duffy, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers UniversityCamden, the statistics of succession may be used to determine the likelihood of success in your next relationship. In an unscientific study, Duffy surveyed 10 friends and found that, on average, each had been in seven relationships lasting seven months or longer. The odds that their next relationship wouldnt last? Eighty-eight percent.
But that leaves a 12 percent possibility for success, and Duffy likes those odds. Sure, the hope factor diminishes after every successive failure, but by definition, this means that one can never lose hope entirely the law of succession may asymptote very near zero, but it never quite reaches it, due to the fact that the denominator is always one greater than the numerator, says the Rutgers-Camden scholar, who acknowledges that his casual survey is far from definitive.
This would be an interesting study to conduct: the correlation between the number of failed relationships one has had with ones pessimism about the probability that ones next relationship is also going to fail, says Duffy, who studies childhood cognition and development at Rutgers-Camden.
Duffy is available to offer his perspectives on statistical theory in relation to Valentines Day. For more background on this topic, visit Duffys blog at http://experimentaholic.blogspot.com (see the Jan. 22 entry).
Contact Duffy at (856) 225-6204 (office) or seduffy@camden.rutgers.edu. His bio is online at http://crab.rutgers.edu/seduffy.
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