Data Analysis Part Two

Hey! Welcome back. This is the second (and final) discussion of the data analysis.

So, the results turned out well! Here's a picture of the graph: 

When the number of risky decisions were plotted against their respective blink rates, this graph happened. What's really exciting about these results is that the p-value is equal to 0.0018, which means that there is a .0018 chance that these results are random. This means I did in fact find a correlation between blink rate and making risky decisions!

(This is what I felt like when I found out my results.)

My research consultant, Bob, and I  are really excited about these results. Since I surveyed so many different people that vary in age and gender, the next step I am going to take is to do an exploratory analysis. I am going to try and see if there are differences in blink rate when it comes to variation in gender and age. (For the purpose of this paper, though, I am just focusing on the bigger picture and the graph shown above.) 

Of course, I conducted a single study with only 50 people. More experiments need to be done to ensure that blink rate is definitely an indicator of how people will make decisions, but this is certainly a good start. 

There were some outliers, but there usually always are when it comes to collecting data from a large group of people. One person I surveyed is a wealth advisor, and he understood mathematically the risks that I was presenting him with. While most people saw the questions as bets or for sure gains, he went deeper and weighed the actual risks if one were to make the same decision many times. Even though I was presenting these options as a one time choice, it was still interesting to hear someone’s perspective on which decisions were better to make in the long run.

I also talked to someone who took no risks whatsoever. I think that this participant was under the impression that I was trying to get people to make riskier decisions, or that all of the risky options were secretly the “wrong” decisions, so he played all of them safe. However, in my survey I specified in the beginning that there were in fact no wrong answers. I also did not want everyone to answer the questions in one particular manner; I was hoping to see that they tended to prefer riskier answers if their corresponding blink rates were higher. Astonishingly, I found that result!

I would like to once again take this time to thank everybody who participated in my study. I approached many people, and a lot of them just flat out said no. I also promised everyone that I would compensate them with candy, but only three people actually wanted candy afterwards. It was really nice of everyone to help me out. Also, shoutout to my math teacher, Mrs. Bailey, for being really supportive. If you’re reading this, hi! 

Thanks for reading, and I hope you come back next week. 

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