Why we like even numbers

DO you have a preference for odd or even numbers? Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, does: “I really like even numbers, and I like heavily divisible numbers,” she says in the latest Vogue. “Twelve is my lucky number – I just love how divisible it is. I don’t like odd numbers, and I really don’t like primes. When I turned 37, I put on a strong face, but I was not looking forward to 37. But 37 turned out to be a pretty amazing year. Especially considering that 36 is divisible by 12!”

It might sound a bit, well, odd, to think about numbers in this way, but – to a certain extent – the rest of us have similar feelings. We like even numbers more than odd numbers, even if we don’t know it. In a survey published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2010, marketing professors Dan King and Chris Janiszewski asked volunteers if they liked, disliked or felt neutral about the numbers from one to 100. On average, the respondents liked even and divisible numbers much more than they liked prime numbers, which are those numbers only divisible by themselves and one. The number that was most liked was 100, with 87% approval, and the two numbers most disliked were 37 and 67, with 61% disapproval.