Question

A scientist simulates chance outcomes by randomly re-sorting treatment groups one hundred times and constructing a distribution of the response variable means for each treatment group. What can the scientist predict about the means of the treatment group distributions?(1 point) Responses The means of the treatment group distributions will be exactly the same. The means of the treatment group distributions will be exactly the same. The means of the treatment group distributions will be very close to each other and close to the mean of the entire population. The means of the treatment group distributions will be very close to each other and close to the mean of the entire population. The means of the treatment group distributions will be very different from the response variable mean of the entire population. The means of the treatment group distributions will be very different from the response variable mean of the entire population. The means of the treatment group distributions will be very different.

Answer 1

The most accurate prediction the scientist can make based on their method of randomly re-sorting treatment groups and constructing a distribution of means is:

The means of the treatment group distributions will be very close to each other and close to the mean of the entire population.

This is because random re-sorting simulates the null hypothesis, under which we expect that any observed differences in means would arise from chance alone. Hence, if the treatments truly do not have an effect, the means will cluster around the overall population mean.