In a chapter Preview we presented a study showing that handling money reduces the perception pain (Zhou, Vohs &Baumeister, 2009). In the experiment a group of college students was told that they were participating in a manual dexterity study. Half of the students were given a stack of money to count and the other half got a stack of blank paper. After the counting task, the participants were asked to dip their hands into bowls of very hot water (122°F) and rate how uncomfortable it was. The following data show ratings of pain similar to the results obtained in the study.
Counting money Counting paper
7 9
8 11
10 13
6 10
8 11
5 9
7 15
12 14
5 10
(a) is there a significant difference in reported pain between the two conditions? Use a two-tailed test. with α=0.01.
