Task 1: One of my pet hates is ‘pop psychology’ books. Along with banishing Freud from all bookshops, it is my avowed ambition to rid the world of these rancid putrefaction-ridden wastes of trees. Not only do they give psychology a very bad name by stating the bloody obvious and charging people for the privilege, but they are also considerably less enjoyable to look at than the trees killed to produce them (admittedly the same could be said for the turgid tripe that I produce in the name of education, but let’s not go there just for now).

Anyway, as part of my plan to rid the world of popular psychology I did a little experiment. I took two groups of people who were in relationships and randomly assigned them to one of two conditions.

One group read the famous popular psychology book Women Are from Bras, Men Are from Penis, whereas another group read Marie Claire. I tested only 10 people in each of these groups, and the dependent variable was an objective measure of their happiness with their relationship after reading the book. I didn’t make any specific prediction about which reading material would improve relationship happiness. The data are in the file Penis.dat. Analyse them with the appropriate t-test.