The first steps of analysis focused on the descriptive statistics for each of the four conditions, which can be seen in Table 2. Between the two levels for religion, Sunni Islam (M = 4.34) was rated as more attractive than Methodist Christianity (M = 4.18), which did not support the initial hypothesis that Christianity would be deemed more attractive than Islam. Our hypothesis concerning tattoos held that the presence of tattoos would be rated relatively more attractive than the absence of tattoos. On the contrary, the average rating of attractiveness for the profiles possessing descriptions of tattoos (M = 4.03) was higher than that for the profiles without tattoo descriptions (M = 4.54). It was important to note that neither differences in
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Obviously, the data came from a very specific population: male college students and a male professor who were entering the university library. Therefore, we cannot state that the findings can be applied to any population who does not exactly fall into the category of “male college student attending Coastal Carolina University” or “male professor teaching at Coastal Carolina University”, for the data would not be an appropriate representation. There are students and professors who were already at the library prior to data collection, students and professors who did not or perhaps never go to the library, female students and professors of the university, and individuals who do not attend the university. All of these individuals, and more, were excluded from the sample and, thus, cannot be generalized by the results of this investigation. Even though the sample size utilized was small, there is an indication that religious affiliation does not affect a person’s attractiveness. For this reason, a larger sample size may not cause the results to show a significant effect of religious affiliation on attractiveness. Now, in contrast, there is a possibility that the presence or absence of tattoos does have a significant impact on attractiveness, and a larger sample size to provide a better representation of the targeted population would reveal this. The only way to discover this would be to replicate the experiment in the same setting as it was conducted here. An interesting procedure would lie with a different type of manipulation of the two factors to see if similar results would be
Obviously, the data came from a very specific population: male college students and a male professor who were entering the university library. Therefore, we cannot state that the findings can be applied to any population who does not exactly fall into the category of “male college student attending Coastal Carolina University” or “male professor teaching at Coastal Carolina University”, for the data would not be an appropriate representation. There are students and professors who were already at the library prior to data collection, students and professors who did not or perhaps never go to the library, female students and professors of the university, and individuals who do not attend the university. All of these individuals, and more, were excluded from the sample and, thus, cannot be generalized by the results of this investigation. Even though the sample size utilized was small, there is an indication that religious affiliation does not affect a person’s attractiveness. For this reason, a larger sample size may not cause the results to show a significant effect of religious affiliation on attractiveness. Now, in contrast, there is a possibility that the presence or absence of tattoos does have a significant impact on attractiveness, and a larger sample size to provide a better representation of the targeted population would reveal this. The only way to discover this would be to replicate the experiment in the same setting as it was conducted here. An interesting procedure would lie with a different type of manipulation of the two factors to see if similar results would be