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Lab Activity #11:

Introduction to Hypothesis Testing (KEY)

1. Suppose a card is held up and the subject is just guessing when responding. What is the
probability that the subject will guess correctly?

1/5, or 0.20

2. If a subject is just guessing the symbol on a card at random, what proportion (out of 10 cards)
would you expect the person to correctly identify?

Out of 10 cards (or 10 trials), we’d expect one fifth of the trials to result in correct
identifications of symbols if a subject is just guessing
. As a proportion, that would be 0.20. This would mean we’d expect 0.2 x 10 = 2 cards
to be correctly identified.

3. Look again at your answer to Question 2. How would you expect that proportion to change if
someone actually does have ESP (assuming that ESP exists)? In other words, would you expect
the proportion to be larger or smaller than what you wrote down in response to Question 2?

We’d expect MORE than 0.20 cards to be correctly identified if the subject has ESP.

Think carefully about what is going on here. We have two competing hypotheses. It could be that an
individual is just guessing when trying to identify the symbol on the card, or, it could be that the
individual has psychic abilities (or ESP) and is not just guessing. How can we rule out that a person is
just guessing? Think about that as we move forward in this activity.

Your recitation instructor will now show you 10 cards (without allowing you to see the symbols, of
course). Each time a card is held up, please mark your guess below, in the following table (remember
your options each time are Circle, Plus, Waves, Square, and Star). After you have all written down a
response for a card, you will be told what the actual card is. Make sure to mark whether you were right or
wrong for each card.
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4. Out of the 10 cards that were shown, what proportion did you get correct? Write this number
below.

Answers will vary. I got 0.20 correct.

A distribution of sample statistics will now appear in the lower right-hand corner of the applet. This
distribution is centered at approximately 0.20, but it’s not Normal because of our smaller sample size.
Ideally, we’d want a larger sample size to ensure a Normal sampling distribution, but we will proceed
here with caution in order to illustrate some important big ideas.

More about the sampling distribution:

• Shape: It may be getting close to Normal, but given the small sample size, it will not be
perfectly Normal. With a larger sample size, we’d expect a more Normal distribution of
sample statistics.

• Center: The center will be at 0.20 since this is our expectation if subjects are just
guessing. We’d expect many to get around 0.20 correct. (note that the distribution you
see might have a center that is not exactly equal to 0.20, but close, since that distribution
is simply showing many samples but not “all possible samples”)

• Variability (or Standard Deviation): We can use the following formula to determine the
𝑝 (1−𝑝) 0.20(1−0.20)
variability of the sampling distribution: √ 𝑛
=√
10
≈0.13. (note that the
distribution you see might have a standard deviation that is not exactly 0.13, but close,
since that distribution is simply showing many samples but not “all possible samples”)

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5. Imagine that you have a friend who is able to correctly identify 4 out of 10 cards.

a. The sample proportion (or 𝑝̂ ) for your friend would be equal to 4/10 or 0.40.

b. On the left, type the sample proportion you wrote above (in response to Part a of Question 5)
in the box next to “As extreme as ≥” and then click on the Count button. You will now see,
in red, the proportion of 1000 samples that had sample proportions that were 0.40 or larger.
What is that proportion?

Answers may vary here. When I did this, I found that 119/1000, or 0.1190, of the sample
proportions were 0.40 or larger.

c. Statistics vary from sample to sample. Even if the population proportion is 0.20, not every
sample proportion will be exactly 0.20. How do we determine when a sample proportion is
far enough above 0.20 to provide evidence of ESP? What do you think?

Answers will vary here, and we mostly wanted to see what YOU thought about how far
away a value from 0.20 needed to be in order to convince you that someone has ESP.
Does it need to be more than one standard deviation away (on the sampling distribution)?
More than two standard deviations away? At the 90th percentile? At the 95th percentile?

Ultimately, we need a way of standardizing our sample statistic and determining the
likelihood of obtaining that sample statistic, or something more extreme, if the null
hypothesis is true. We have to find the probability of getting a sample statistic that far
away—or even farther way—if the true population proportion is 0.20. The smaller that
probability is, the more evidence we have that a person might truly have ESP (as opposed
to just guessing).

What you wrote down in response to Question 5b is a p-value. This is the probability of obtaining a
sample statistic as extreme or more extreme than the observed sample statistic, if our null hypothesis is
true. Here, our null hypothesis would be that subjects are just guessing when presented with Zener
cards. The alternative hypothesis would be that subjects have psychic powers (and thus would do better
than just guessing). In symbols, we would write those hypotheses as follows:

Ho: p = 0.20
Ha: p > 0.20

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the hypotheses above, “p” is the symbol used to denote the population
proportion. This is different from the p-value that is obtained once a sample has been gathered and
summarized.

6. Based on the p-value you obtained in response to Question 5b, do you think you have evidence in
favor of or against the null hypothesis? Please explain.

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There is almost a 12% chance we would have obtained a sample proportion of 0.40 or
greater, if the true population proportion is 0.20. This is not a rare enough outcome for us
to reject the null hypothesis. Therefore, we have evidence in favor of the null hypothesis.

Another way of thinking about this is to consider how the p-value deviates from the
significance level. Here, we did not give you a significance level, but a commonly used
level is 0.05. If the p-value is larger than 0.05, we know that we do not have enough
evidence against the null hypothesis.

A larger p-value provides support in favor of the null hypothesis; a smaller p-value
provides evidence against the null hypothesis.

7. Now, we want to give you a chance to work through a hypothesis test by hand, based on what you
have learned in lecture. To help you get started, we’ll imagine the same scenario with the Zener
cards, but this time, rather than a sample size of 10 (i.e., 10 chances to guess what is on the card),
our sample size is 30. If an individual is just guessing across many trials, that person would be
expected to get a proportion of 0.20 correct. If the person has ESP, we would expect the
proportion correct to be greater than 0.20.

In 30 trials, or 30 guesses, your lecturer was able to get 9 correct. This means your lecturer has a
sample proportion (or 𝑝̂ ) of 0.30.

Does this provide compelling evidence that your lecturer might have ESP?

Use the information above to conduct the appropriate hypothesis test by going through the steps
we discussed in lecture. Assume the alpha level is .05 (or 5%). Fill in the following table with
your answers, and be sure to show all your work.
Hypotheses Ho: p = 0.20
Ha: p > 0.20

Test Statistic 0.30−0.20 0.10

𝑧= = = 1.4
0.20(0.80) 0.07
√
30

p-value 0.0808

(Note we get this by looking up 1.4 in Table B. We must then take 100%-91.92% =
8.08%; we divide 8.08% by 100 to express our result as a probability.)
What is your Since our p-value is larger than the alpha level of .05, we FAIL TO REJECT the null
decision, and hypothesis. We do not have enough evidence in this sample of data to suggest that the
why? lecturer is not just guessing when trying to identify the Zener cards.

8. Look carefully at your work above, and think about your final decision. Would your decision
have been the same if the alpha level was 0.10 rather than 0.05? Please explain.

If our alpha level was larger, we would have rejected the null hypothesis, so no, our
decision would not have been the same. A p-value of .0808 is less than .10, but it’s not
less than .05.