Consider the Following (Edited)excerpt from a James Thurber New Yorker

question 61

Multiple Choice

Consider the following (edited) excerpt from a James Thurber New Yorker piece: "Suddenly someone began to run.It may be that he had simply remembered … an engagement to meet his wife,for which he was now frightfully late.Whatever it was,he ran east on Broad Street....Somebody else began to run,perhaps a newsboy in high spirits....Another man … broke into a trot....A loud mumble gradually crystallized into the dread word 'damn.' 'The dam has broke!' The fear was put into words by a little old lady in an electric car,or by a traffic cop,or by a small boy: Nobody knows who....Two thousand people were abruptly in full flight...." This literary excerpt illustrates the phenomenon known as

• A) contagion.
• B) conversion.
• C) mass hysteria.
• D) collective psychosis.
• E) obedience.

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Definitions:

Hypotheses

Predetermined statements or propositions that are tested through scientific methods to see if they hold true under specific conditions.

Relative Risk

The ratio of the probability of an event occurring in an exposed group to the probability of the event occurring in a control group.

Appropriate Values

Selected data points that are deemed suitable or fitting for a specific statistical analysis or context.

Mean

The average of a set of numbers, calculated by adding them together and dividing by the number of quantities in the set.