Statistics and the Milk in Tea Conundrum
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I guess many of us have experienced milk tea. Not only is Taiwanese milk tea very popular, but also British-style tea that milk is usually added at just about an 80:20 tea-to-milk ratio.
However, to make a perfect cup of milk tea, should we put milk BEFORE or AFTER tea? This is an age-old conundrum that has been argued over by Brits and it interestingly led to the invention of a statistical theory.
The lady testing tea experiment
In the early 1900s, one day at a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, Ronald Fisher offered a cup of hot tea to Muriel Bristol, but she declined it because she preferred the flavour of the milk put into the cup before the tea. Fisher didn’t quite get it and thought that the order of pouring couldn’t affect the flavour. However, Bristol strongly asserted that it did and she could tell the difference. Therefore a group of statisticians, including Fisher, wanted to test her claim by giving her eight cups, four of each recipe, in random order. Later, this experiment has become well-known as THE LADY TASTING TEA experiment.
At the end of this experiment, the lady Bristol identified 6 out of 8 correctly, but Fisher still doubted that How did he know that the lady can truly tell the difference between milk-in-first and milk-in-last tea? Was the proportion of 6 out of 8 enough to tell that she didn’t distinguish the cups correctly just by chance?
After the experiment with Bristol, Fisher devised a statistical significance test called “Fisher’s exact test”. The hypothesis of the experiment was that there was no difference between milk-in-first and milk-in-last tea. The result obtained from Fisher’s exact test showed that at significance level 0.05 (5%), the probability that the lady identified the method of making tea correctly happening by chance was about 0.24 (24%) which was non-significant (0.24 > 0.05). Therefore, the hypothesis wasn’t rejected.
Thanks for the math explanation from brainder.
This is such a great contribution to science inspired by small things in our day to day lives. It actually inspired me to make cups of milk tea and to taste whether milk-first or tea-first are different. Honestly, they are the same haha.
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