The Daisy’s Trick

“She loves me,” says a man in love, picking off the first petal of a daisy. “She loves me not,” he says a moment later, picking off the next petal. And so, he continues removing the petals, until the last of the flower is gone and the results are in. The daisy helped the player determine whether or not he’s loved by the girl he desires.

But how did the daisy know that?

The daisy’s trick is that it gets a little help from the man himself. People play the “she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not” game with all sorts of questions, and the answer is not always 50-50. And sure enough, if we observe someone de-petaling a daisy in this way, we will usually see them adjust the rules midway through.

“I’m not even sure this is really a daisy,” a player might say as they get halfway through a flower and start to suspect that the result might be unfavorable in the end. They then go on to find another daisy to restart the game and discard the results of the first one. This improves their chances – now it’s only one in two flowers that has to have an even number of petals.

Our internal compass knows exactly how many times we are allowed to start again to balance out the game’s probabilities. If we give ourselves a 9-in-10 chance to be loved back, we might end up “cheating” three to four times, but not more. After that, if the last daisy has bad news, we’ll probably accept the verdict.