The Pleasing Ratio Project

This serious man on the left is Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German philosopher, physicist and experimental psychologist who lived between 1801 and 1887. To be honest, I don't know almost anything of his life or work exepct one thing: he did in the 1860s a thought-provoking experiment. It seems me interesting for two important reasons: he called into question something widely established and obtained experimental data by himself.

Fechners's experiment was simpler than this one: he presented just ten rectangles to 82 students. Then he asked each of them to choose the most pleasing one and obtained revealing discoveries I will not explain here since would cause bias in my experiment.

Although my experiment is absolutely inspired in Fechner’s one, there is a important difference: I can explore a bigger set of ratios doing an A/B test. This makes this one a bit richer.

The experiment has also interesting technical features: the use of shinydashboard package to arrange the App, the use of shinyjs package to add javaScript to refresh page when use choose to play again, to save votes in a text file and to read it to visualize results.

You can find more information about the original experiment here.

Will I obtain the same results as Fechner?

Built With

The project is developed with R and the following packages:

Shiny - To build the web App

shinyjs - To improve the Shiny apps with some JavaScript

shinydashboard - Used to give the App a dashboard appearance

ggplot2 - To create the rectangles

Authors

Antonio Sánchez Chinchón:

The code is licensed under the MIT License and is available in Github