Questioning Smoking Policies

An undergraduate researcher at Dickinson College examined the role of social fibbing (the tendency of subjects to give responses that they think the interviewer wants to hear) with the following experiment. Students were asked, "Would you favor a policy to eliminate smoking from all buildings on campus?" For half of the subjects, the interviewer was smoking a cigarette when asking the question; the other half were interviewed by a nonsmoker. Prior to conducting the experiment, the researcher suspected that students interviewed by a smoker would be less inclined to indicate that they favored the ban. It turned out that 43 of the 100 students interviewed by a smoker favored the ban, compared to 79 of the 100 interviewed by a nonsmoker. Carry out the appropriate test of significance to assess the researcher's hypothesis. Write a brief conclusion as if to the researcher, addressing in particular the question of how likely it is that her experimental results would have occurred by chance alone.