Logical Reasoning

PT130 · S3 · Q12 Researcher: A number of studies have suggested

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Researcher: A number of studies have suggested that, on average, clients in short-term psychotherapy show similar levels of improvement regardless of the kind of psychotherapy they receive.

Conclusion

Any improvement clients get out of short-term psychotherapy must be some common denominator to all psychotherapy (like maybe just having someone listen to you)

Evidence

In a few studies, clients had similar levels of improvement regardless of what type of psychotherapy they got.

Evaluation

If clients show similar improvement regardless of type of therapy, does that mean that something common to all those types is what’s providing the improvement? Is it possible that different therapies are helping in different ways, but it’s still resulting in similar levels of improvement? It is possible, but that doesn’t seem like a great objection. What if the level of improvement all these clients have in common is “almost none”? That would be a more plausible way in which the different types of therapy are trying to help in different ways, and yet they all show similar levels of improvement. There are lots of ways to be un-helpful. :)

Goal

Pretty murky. It seems like we need a different way to explain why people are ending up with similar levels of improvement, despite going to different types of therapy, or we need to weaken the plausibility of the author's notion that there is some common ingredient to all these therapies that is the real causal help.

12.

Which one of the following, if true, would most weaken the researcher's argument?

  1. Correct

    The methods by which the

    Why this is right

    This is a really tricky correct answer, because it essentially hurts the value of the evidence. Since the studies ignored important kinds of improvement, it isn’t really fair to say that these clients had similar levels of improvement from their psychotherapy. We don’t know if the different types of therapy really provided similar levels of help, because important kinds of improvement weren’t measured. This hits the author’s argument way upstream, suggesting that the data the author is going off of isn’t providing a full, accurate picture.

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

    45% picked this

  2. On average, clients improve more

    Out of Scope: “long-term psychotherapy”

    This argument is only about assessing what benefit short-term therapy has and what aspects of that therapy contribute to that benefit. Long-term therapy is totally outside the boundaries of relevance.

    5% picked this

  3. The studies found that psychotherapy

    Irrelevant Comparison: “trained / untrained” / Opposite

    This comparison is either irrelevant or strengthens the argument. If there’s no difference in improvement based on the talent/skill of the therapist, then it supports the author’s notion that the beneficial part of the therapy is something general and simple like listening to the client.

    12% picked this

  4. The specific techniques and interventions

    Unclear or Opposite Impact

    We can’t use this to say, “there aren’t any aspects that are common to all psychotherapies”, because the author has already identified at least one example of one. So learning that these therapies have huge differences (and yet seem to be achieving similar client outcomes) would help the author’s case. It would be pretty implausible for lots of very different techniques to achieve the same level of client improvement. It is more likely that something common to all the therapies would achieve the same level of client improvement.

    36% picked this

  5. More-experienced therapists tend to use

    Irrelevant Comparison: “more-experienced / inexperienced”

    This argument is comparing the effectiveness of different types of therapies, not different types of therapists. We would have no way of relating this fact about different experience levels of therapists and assigning it any relevance to different types of therapies.

    3% picked this

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