1. Radel and colleagues (2011) conducted a study of how feeling overly controlled makes you desireeven unconsciouslymore freedom. In their study, 52 Canadian undergraduates played a video game in a laboratory and were randomly assigned to one1 of the following:

An automony deprivation condition, in which they were told to follow instructions precisely, constantly given instructions over a loudspeaker, and carefully observed on everything they did.

A neutral condition, which was much more laid back.

After this activity, they were asked to do a lexical decision task (a standard approach for measuring unconscious responses), in which they were shown a series of words and nonwords in random order and had to press C if it was a real word or N if not. Half of the real words were related to autonomy (such as freedom and choice), and half were neutral (such as whisper and hammer). The key focus of the study was on how long it took people to press the button (response latency) for each kind of real word, averaged over the many words of each type. The table below shows the mean and standard deviation across the participants of these four categories of results. For example, 782 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) is the average time it took participants in the autonomy-deprived condition to respond to the autonomy-related words, and 211 is the standard deviation across the 26 participants average response time in that condition. Explain the numbers in this table to a person who has never taken a course in statistics. (Be sure to explain some specific numbers, as well as the general principle of the mean and standard deviation.) For your interest, the pattern of results shown here supported the researchers hypothesis: Relative to a neutral instructional climate, a controlling climate thwarting the need for autonomyenhanced accessibility for autonomy-related words (p. 924).

Mean Latencies (in Milliseconds) in the Lexical Task Assessing Accessibility for Autonomy-Related Constructs (Experiment 1)
	Condition
	Autonomy Deprivation	Neutral
Construct	M	SD		M	SD
Autonomy-related words	782	211	857	243
Neutral words	835	258		841	301

2. A researcher records the levels of attraction for various fashion models among college students. He finds that mean levels of attraction are much higher than the median and the mode for these data.

a. What is the shape of the distribution for the data in this study?

b. What measure of central tendency is most appropriate for describing these data? Why?