Logical Reasoning

PT122 · S1 · Q12 Poor nutrition is at the

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Poor nutrition is at the root of the violent behavior of many young offenders.

Conclusion

Poor nutrition is at the root of the violent behavior of many young offenders.

Intermediate Conclusion

The results from this prison study confirm a link between poor nutrition and violent behavior.

Evidence

In one study of young offenders, the violent inmates consistently chose foods that were low in nutrients.

In another study, some violent inmates were switched onto a diet high in nutrients, and there was a steady improvement in their behavior over the four months of the experiment.

Evaluate

Since the argument is interpreting the causal meaning behind the results of a study, we should use our Explain Curious Fact framework.

Curious Fact ... Why is it that there was a steady improvement in the behavior of violent inmates during the four months after they were placed on a diet high in nutrients?

Author's Explanation ... Poor nutrition causes violent behavior, so once we improved their nutrition, the violent behavior started to go away.

We always evaluate these via two different lines of inquiry: 1. Could there be an Alternate Explanation for the curious fact? 2. How plausible is the Author's Interpretation?

Can we think of other reasons why the behavior would have improved among these violent inmates who were placed on the high nutrition diet?

Maybe it's a reverse causality sort of thing --- the people who are willing to be rehabilitated in prison are more likely to agree to be placed on a high nutrient diet in an experiment. Being placed on the experimental diet didn't cause their behavior to improve. Their willingness to improve is what led them to participate in the experiment.

Maybe it's just a case that four months in prison mellows you out. You came into prison a violent offender, but once you see how badly you get disciplined if you act out in prison, you start to fall in line (that would be classified as an "improvement in their behavior").

How plausible is the idea that poor nutrition leads to violent behavior? Is there any physiological explanation that could help us understand that causal mechanism (i.e. do nutrients give us the will power to resist doing bad things?) Are there any more data points that show good behavior correlated with good nutrition or bad behavior correlated with bad nutrition?

Goal

Since this is Strengthen, we're more likely to see an answer that boosts the plausibility of the Author's Explanation. The most common form of correct answer on Strengthen (for Explain Curious Fact arguments) is a No Cause, No Effect answer, like .

But a correct answer could also rule out an alternate explanation for why their behavior improved, like .

12.

Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument?

  1. Some of the violent inmates

    No Impact

    This is incredibly weak, ("Some" = at least one), so it's unlikely to ever be a correct answer on Strengthen, Weaken, Paradox, or Sufficient Assumption. Being told that at least one of the inmates committed a bunch of violent crimes does nothing to help us assess the results of this experiment or figure out whether poor nutrition is a causal factor in violent crime. By contrast, an answer like "The violent inmates who committed the largest number of violent crimes were the ones with the poorest nutrition before they entered the experiment" would strengthen.

    0% picked this

  2. Dietary changes are easier and

    No Impact

    We don't care how cheap or easy a dietary change is. We're not evaluating whether or not to launch a "Better Nutrition for Prisoners" initiative. We're just analyzing whether there's any causal impact of changing prisoners' diet. Knowing that it's cheap / easy to do X doesn't tell us anything about what effect X does or doesn't have.

    0% picked this

  3. Many young offenders have reported

    Weak Impact

    On a formal level this adds some plausibility to the author's explanation, because it pairs up the supposed Cause (low-nutrient foods) with the supposed Effect (violent behavior). But it is a grain of sand's worth of strengthening power. To say "many young offenders had a low-nutrient food sometime in the days before they committed a violent crime" is akin to saying, "At least five of these young offenders ate a Kit-Kat within five days of committing a violent crime." Would you take from that statement that eating the Kit-Kat was a causal factor in the violent crime? Of course not.

    13% picked this

  4. A further study investigated young

    Weak Impact

    On a formal level this adds some plausibility to the author's explanation, because it pairs up No Cause (high nutrition diet) with No Effect (nonviolent behavior). But again, the strength of language is very lacking. In a study, we looked at young offenders who chose a high-nutrient diet and found that many of them were nonviolent. What percent of the group was nonviolent? That would be more informative. If there were 200 young offenders who eat high-nutrient diets and we found that 20 of them were nonviolent, that would allow us to say "Many of them are nonviolent!" But that's only 10% of the group. That would still mean 90% of the young offenders eating a high-nutrient diet were violent. That would badly hurt the argument. Since many is such a wishy-washy quantity with a very low minimum, this answer doesn't tell us whether most of the high-nutrition offenders are violent or nonviolent, so it really doesn't move the needle in either direction.

    11% picked this

  5. Correct

    The violent inmates in the

    Why this is right

    This is the classic "No Cause, No Effect" plausibility-strengthener. The author thinks that the higher nutrition diet in the experiment is what caused the improvement in behavior. This answer pairs up "people not on the diet" with "not improved behavior". In the scientific method, this is known as The Control Group. If you want to check whether the high-nutrition diet is really a causal difference-maker, then you have some of the violent inmates go on the diet and other violent inmates stay on their normal low-nutrition diets. If the behavior of the high-nutrition prisoners gets better (which we were told in the argument) and the behavior of the low-nutrition prisoners stays the same (which we are being told in this answer), then it looks like that new high-nutrition diet really was a causal difference-maker.

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

    75% picked this

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