Several recent studies establish

Answer choices

1. A

   Weakens4% picked this

   In another recent study, most of the people surveyed indicated that they would not want to be told if they

   This is amusingly blunt, but yes, this weakens because it's a study announcing the opposite of what the conclusion says.

   4%
2. B

   Weakens3% picked this

   People often do not indicate their true feelings when responding

   This weakens by making the surveys appealed to by the author seem like less compelling, less trustworthy evidence. If people often don't indicate their true feelings, then can we really trust this survey data to accurately reflect people's true feelings?

   3%
3. C

   Correct67% picked this

   Some of the researchers conducting the studies had no background

   Why this is right

   This doesn't hurt the argument at all. We don't need for any of these researchers to have a background of medicine, and this is saying something much softer ("at least one researcher had no background in medicine"). The research, as far as we know, is just an opinion survey. It would be good for such a researcher to have a background in statistics, data science, and maybe interpersonal psychology. But they don't need any background in medicine to find people, give them a survey, and then tabulate survey results.

   Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   67%
4. D

   Weakens12% picked this

   Some questions asked in the studies suggested that reasonable people would want to be told if they had

   This answer weakens by making it seem like the study implicitly encouraged / biased respondents to saying "they would want to be informed". If the survey was making the respondents think, "hmm, reasonable people would want to be informed", then since they want to seem like reasonable people themselves, they would assent to the same opinion, even if they didn't really mean it. This makes the surveys being relied on more sketchy, almost like they asked a leading question.

   12%
5. E

   Weakens14% picked this

   The people surveyed in the studies were all young students in

   Because the survey was drawn from such a specific subset of the population (18-22 year old college students in psych classes), it's way harder to assume that the survey's results are automatically representative of all people. This makes the survey seem sketchy by indicating that it does not have a diverse, representative sample of the population.

   14%