Question 14.51

14.51 Organic foods and morals?

Organic foods are often marketed using moral terms such as “honesty” and “purity.” Is this just a marketing strategy, or is there a conceptual link between organic food and morality? In one experiment, 62 undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three food conditions (organic, comfort, and control).9 First, each participant was given a packet of four food types from the assigned condition and told to rate the desirability of each food on a 7-point scale. Then, each was presented with a list of six moral transgressions and asked to rate each on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 = not at all morally wrong to 7 = very morally wrong. The average of these six scores was used as the response.

organic

  1. Make a table giving the sample size, mean, and standard deviation for each group. Is it reasonable to pool the variances?
  2. Generate a histogram for each of the groups. Can we feel confident that the sample means are approximately Normal? Explain your answer.

14.51

(a)

Score
Level of
Food		 Mean Std Dev
Comfort 22 4.8873 0.5729
Control 20 5.0825 0.6217
Organic 35 5.5835 0.5936

Yes, the largest is less than twice the smallest ; . (b) While the distributions aren’t Normal, there are no outliers or extreme departures from Normality that would invalidate the results. We can likely proceed with the ANOVA.