Anchoring is the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or anchor, on one trait or piece

Anchoring is €œthe common human tendency to rely too heavily, or €˜anchor,€™ on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.€ (Source: Wikipedia.) A group of students taking an introductory statistics course at a four-year university in California were asked to guess the population of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Some of the students were randomly chosen to be told that the nearby city of Chicago, Illinois has a population of about 3 million people, while the rest of the students were told that the nearby city of Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of about 100,000. Previous studies have shown that these numbers serve as a psychological anchor, so people told about Chicago tend to guess a higher population for Milwaukee than people told about Green Bay. (For more about this phenomenon, see the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.) The purpose in analyzing the data is to see if we find strong evidence of this phenomenon among students like the ones in this study.
a. Identify the observational units.
b. Identify the explanatory variable and the response variable in this study. Also classify each as categorical or quantitative.
c. Is this an observational study or an experiment? Explain.

d. Were the subjects in this study randomly selected from a population? Explain.
e. Were the subjects in this study randomly assigned to groups? Explain.
The data set is titled Milwaukee. The first column contains the city mentioned to subjects, and the second column contains the guesses for the population of Milwaukee (in thousands, to the nearest thousand).

f. Using an appropriate applet (e.g., the Multiple Means applet) find and record the following summary statistics for the guesses made about Milwaukee€™s population by the city which they were told about:

g. Find and report the difference in the average guess made by those told about Chicago and those told about Green Bay.
h. Give two possible explanations for the observed difference in average guesses for the population of Milwaukee reported in part (g).

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Sample size Sample mean Sample SD Chicago Green Bay