Does watching award-winning 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 high quality 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 below 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?