Do You Like Pugs?

For our stats project we decided to analyze how the characteristics of the person asking the question changes the answer. To do this, we asked two randomly selected groups of people the exact question: “do you like pugs?” However, one group was asked the question by someone wearing a pug shirt, and the other group was asked by someone in plain clothes. We believed the most submissive class to the charastric bias would be the freshman, so we used them in our experiment. To ensure this Simple Random Sample was completely random, we assigned every student in the freshman class a number and then used the random number generator on our calculator. The first twenty five students selected were placed in the non-pug wearing shirt group, and the last twenty five students selected were placed in the pug wearing shirt group. We hypothesized that wearing a pug shirt would persuade people to say that they liked pugs even when they did not. Our hypothesis proved to be correct. While overall the vast majority of people said they liked pugs, the three no’s that we received only came from the group who did not see the pug shirt. 88% of the non-pug shirt group said yes, while 100% of the pug shirt said yes to the question. We asked twenty-five people in each group and did not receive a single no from the pug shirt group. This data shows that there is some persuasion that comes from what the questionnaire is wearing.