#13 - A recent study reveals that television advertising

[sneeze]

Hi! I picked the correct answer for this question, but i was down to the wire and i was picking between (a) and (d). I understand now that (d) is a strengthen answer choice, and we're looking for a weaken one. but could someone walk me through the causal reasoning in this question and why exactly (d) strengthens rather than weakens?

[Adam Tyson]

Happy to, and bless you, sneeze!

The conclusion of the argument is that television ads do NOT affect preferences. That is what I would call an anti-causal argument, because the author is arguing that one thing does NOT cause something else. To weaken that, we need an answer that suggests that perhaps those ads DO affect preferences. We need an answer that says there IS a causal relationship there.

Answer D strengthens the argument by showing that the ads are not having an effect - the low-sugar cereals are heavily advertised and the kids still don't want them. That supports the claim that the ads don't affect the preferences of children by showing that where the would-be cause (advertisements) is present, the effect (children's preference) is not present. The conclusion that there is no effect is borne out here.

Answer A weakens the argument by showing that there could be an effect present. The kids watching TV are influencing the ones that are not watching, so perhaps the ads are having an influence on all children, even if some of them are influenced indirectly!

TL:DR: The argument is that ads have no effect. D shows that ads have no effect, so strengthens. A shows that ads have an effect, so weakens.

[rightway1566]

Can someone provide an explanation as why C is wrong? I believed " Most of the children in the group that had watched television were already familiar with the advertisements for these cereals." introduced the possibility that the preference of kids in the advertisement group was in fact being impacted by the ads, while the control group might have liked the cereal by chance.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi rightway,

Let's focus in on the goal here. We want to weaken the conclusion that TV ads don't affect preferences for sugary cereals. Why? Because the children who saw ads and who didn't see ads both seemed to like the sugary cereal.

Whose behavior is surprising here? For me, it's the children who didn't see ads. Why do they still prefer the sugary cereal? The argument concludes that it's not TV advertisements. We want to weaken that conclusion by saying the TV ads are really responsible for BOTH sets of kids' preference.

That's what answer choice (A) does. It shows a way that the no TV kids are STILL influenced by the advertisements.

Answer choice (C) doesn't impact the argument. Even if the group that had seen advertisements were already familiar with the advertisements, it doesn't hurt the idea that the ads didn't impact the preferences. We already knew that group of kids had seen the ads. It didn't really matter that they saw them before.

Hope that helps!