10.27 An independent-samples t test, award-winning television, and the theory of mind: Does watching awardwinning fiction on television help us to understand other people? Psychologists Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) tested whether people who watched award-winning fictional television shows like Mad Men and The West Wing performed better on a test of theory of mind than people who watch documentaries like episodes from the series Shark Week and How the Universe Works. After randomly watching either a highquality fictional show or a documentary for about a half-hour, participants were asked to look at a series of 36 photos of people’s eyes and decide if each person was jealous, panicked, arrogant, or hateful. Scores ranged from 0 (guessed no emotions correctly) to 36 (guessed every emotion correctly). The data at the top of the next column approximate the actual means and standard errors in the study.

TV fiction Documentary 28 27 30 26 31 28 27 29 29 29 29 28 31 27 27 26 29

a. Conduct all six steps of an independent-samples t test. Be sure to label all six steps.

b. Report the statistics as you would in a journal article.

c. Calculate the 95% confidence interval.

d. State in your own words what we learn from this confidence interval.

e. Express the confidence interval, in a sentence, as a margin of error.

f. Calculate the appropriate measure of effect size.

g. Based on Cohen’s conventions, is this a small, medium, or large effect size? h. Why is it useful to have this information in addition to the results of a hypothesis test?