A social scientist believes that university theology professors are more conservative in political orientation than their colleagues in psychology. A random sample of 8 professors from the theology department and 12 professors from the psychology department at a local university are given a 50-point questionnaire that measures the degree of political conservatism. The following scores were obtained. Higher scores indicate greater conservatism.
a. What is the alternative hypothesis? In this case, assume a non-directional hypothesis is appropriate because there are insufficient theoretical and empirical bases to warrant a directional hypothesis.
b. What is the null hypothesis?
c. What is your conclusion? Use the Mann-Whitney U test and α = 0.052 tail.