Politician: A major social problem

Answer choices

1. A

   Too Weak3% picked this

   Some of the children who did not punch the Bobo doll, including some who had been shown the film, chastised those

   Causal arguments almost always tolerate some exceptions. When you claim that "smoking cigarettes increases one's risk of lung cancer", it doesn't weaken your claim to say that "some people smoke cigarettes but don't get lung cancer". These are messy, real-world claims about tendencies, not absolutes. Our author is only claiming that watching the Bobo video made the video-watching children, on average, more violent around the Bobo doll than the other children were. The fact that some kids who didn't see the video still hit Bobo or that some kids who saw the video didn't hit Bobo (and chastised those who did) does not weaken this claim.

   3%
2. B

   Too Weak13% picked this

   The child who punched the Bobo doll the hardest and the most frequently had not

   This is one paltry data point. The kid who hit Bobo the hardest didn't watch the doll. Cool. That doesn't make us re-imagine the data set we got -- on average, the kids who watched the video were more likely to hit the doll. The single kid who struck it with the most force is not helping us to evaluate a large-scale trend, whether he watched the video or didn't watch the video. When we're doing Weaken with causal arguments, there is usually a trap answer saying, "there is at least one data point that doesn't fit the trend you described", and those have no impact. If I say that people who have Instagram accounts are more likely to take a picture every day with their phone, that isn't me promising that "every single person" with an IG account takes a pic per day on their phone. It's an average. It tolerates exceptions.

   13%
3. C

   Correct73% picked this

   The children who had been shown the film were found to be no more likely than the children who had not been shown

   Why this is right

   This basically establishes a big disconnect between the evidence and the conclusion. The author may have shown that "kids who watch a video about how other children behave around a toy are more likely to copy that behavior", but she doesn't get to use this Bobo study to say that "watching violent films makes kids more likely to hurt other children", if we're told that the video-watchers were no more likely than the other kids to punch other children.

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

   73%
4. D

   Strengthens, if anything11% picked this

   Some children who had not been shown the film imitated the behavior of those who had been shown the film

   This seems like if anything it would just support the idea that children copy what they see, which can help the author argue that if they watch violent films, they'll copy that violence.

   11%
5. E

   No Impact1% picked this

   Many of the children who participated in the experiment had never seen a Bobo doll

   We weren't really assuming that any of the kids had seen a Bobo doll before the experiment. In fact, the author presumably wants these kids to be blank slates, so that she can show how watching the video (or not watching it) "instructed" the kids how to behave around a Bobo doll. If they had prior knowledge of Bobo dolls or how to behave around them, that would actually make it messier to interpret the data.

   1%