Yesterday (04/13/2025), Science Committee held a fun little experiment to see if ten participants at DMS could tell the difference between mexican coca-cola and regular coca-cola. Each participant had to do at least ten trials (We started out with 15 but that was too much for most people so we had to reduce it down to 10). For each trial, participants were given three cups. Two cups contained regular coca-cola and one cup contained mexican coca-cola. The participant was asked to guess which of the three cups contained mexican coca-cola.
As you can see in the figure above, only participant 2 (Dennis Oleksyuk @dennis_o) and participant 7 (Russell Crow @Russell_Crow) could determine which cups were mexican coca-cola consistently enough to where it couldn’t reasonably be called luck. Most participants could not really tell the difference between regular coca-cola and mexican coca-cola.
For more fun activities like this, come to our weekly science sundays. They happen in the science lab every Sunday at 3PM!
It was! We actually discovered something interesting in the process. If you regularly drink coca-cola, you will be far more accurate in telling whether you are drinking regular coca-cola or Mexican coca-cola. The worst performers were people who almost never drink soda.
So we actually have roughly 4 ways we can improve the experimental design for the next time we do a taste test, and one of those involves asking certain questions about drinking habits beforehand.
@kthompson395 I just want to thank you for putting together this activity on such short notice when an unexpected schedule conflict forced me to cancel my previous Science Sunday plans. This looks really fun and educational… wish I could have been there!
