Magen, Dweck, and Gross (2008) asked participants to choose, for example, between $5 today or $7 next week. In one condition, the choices were phrased exactly that way. In a second condition, they were phrased as “$5 today and $0 next week or $0 today and $7 next week,” which is actually the same thing. Each person’s score was the number of choices in which the smaller but sooner choice was made. The mean for the first group was 9.24 and the mean for the second group was 6.10.
(a) What are the null and alternative hypotheses?
(b) What statistics would you compare to answer the question? (You do not yet know how to make that comparison.)
(c) If the difference is significant with a two-tailed test, what would you conclude?