✦ A Habit Two Thousand Years in the Making ✦
Flipping a coin feels like the most casual decision-making tool imaginable. It's easy to forget it's also one of the oldest ones — people have been settling genuine disputes this way for roughly two thousand years.
The Romans called it navia aut caput — "ship or head" — named for the two faces of their coins, one showing the prow of a ship, the other the head of the emperor. It wasn't just a children's game. As Roman law matured, the coin toss became a recognised form of sortition: settling a dispute by leaving it to pure chance rather than to either party's judgement. Framed this way, a coin toss wasn't seen as avoiding a decision — it was seen as removing the possibility of bias entirely. Fair and honest, precisely because nobody was in control of the outcome.
The habit crossed into medieval England under a different name: cross and pile, referring to the cross stamped on one face of early coins and "pile," an old word for the reverse die. Different names, same principle, repeated across cultures for centuries — Peru's cara o sello ("face or seal") is still in everyday use today. Whatever the local word for it, the underlying idea barely changed: two equally likely outcomes, and a willingness to let chance settle what argument couldn't.
"For two thousand years, the coin hasn't been used because chance is wise — it's been used because chance is fair."
The earliest versions of this practice weren't really about chance at all, as we'd think of it now — they were about divine will. A coin landing a particular way wasn't random to the people watching it; it was a god or emperor making their preference known through the toss. That's a meaningfully different idea from how we use a coin flip today, and it's worth sitting with for a second: the ritual is identical, but the belief about where the answer comes from has completely flipped. Once, the coin spoke for something outside you. Now, as far as the psychology goes, it speaks for something already inside you.
Here's a piece of coin-flip history that isn't a legend: in 1845, two men — Asa Lovejoy, originally from Boston, and Francis Pettygrove, originally from Portland, Maine — jointly owned a plot of land in Oregon and couldn't agree on what to name the new settlement growing on it. Each wanted to name it after his own hometown. They settled it with a coin toss, best of three flips. Pettygrove won. The city is Portland, Oregon, to this day, and the coin used — now known as the "Portland Penny" — still exists, preserved as a small, strange piece of American civic history that exists purely because two men couldn't agree and a coin could.
The coin toss never went away — it's still there at the start of a football match, a cricket Test, a schoolyard argument over who goes first. What's changed isn't the ritual. It's the explanation. Nobody today seriously believes the coin channels divine judgement. But the modern psychological reframe is, in its own way, just as interesting: the coin isn't deciding anything. Your reaction to it is. That's the whole premise behind how Flipin' Choice works — two thousand years of ritual, repurposed for a much more personal kind of honesty.
Read next: The Psychology of Decision Making →Curious what your own gut reaction reveals? Enter your two options and find out.
⊙ Flip the Coin Now