The authors of the paper “Deception and Design: The Impact of Communication Technology on Lying Behavior” (Proceedings of Computer Human Interaction [2004]) asked 30 students in an upper division communications course at a large university to keep a journal for 7 days, recording each social interaction and whether or not they told any lies during that interaction. A lie was defined as “any time you intentionally try to mislead someone.” The paper reported that the mean number of lies per day for the 30 students was 1.58 and the standard deviation of number of lies per day was 1.02.
a. What assumption must be made in order for the t confidence interval of this section to be an appropriate method for estimating m, the mean number of lies per day for all students at this university?
b. Would you recommend using the t confidence interval to construct an estimate of m as defined in Part (a)? Explain why or why not.