Ok, this is quite hard to explain, but I'm at a complete loss what to do. I'm a relative newcomer to R and although I can completely admire how powerful it is, I'm not too good at actually using it.... Basically, I have some very contrived data that I need to analyse (it wasn't me who chose this, I can assure you!). I have the right and left hand lengths of lots of people, as well as some numeric data that shows their sociability. Now I would like to know if people who have significantly different lengths of hand are more or less sociable than those who have the same (leading into the research that 'symmetrical' people are more sociable and intelligent, etc. I have got as far as loading the data into R, then I have no idea where to go from there. How on Earth do I start to separate those who are close to symmetrical to those who aren't to then start to do the analysis? Ok, using Sasha's great advice, I did the cor.test and got the following: Pearson's product-moment correlation data: measurements$l.hand - measurements$r.hand and measurements$sociable t = 0.2148, df = 150, p-value = 0.8302 alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0 95 percent confidence interval: -0.1420623 0.1762437 sample estimates: cor 0.01753501 I have never used this test before, so am unsure how to intepret it...you wouldn't think I was on my fourth Scientific degree would you?! :(