PT 72, LR S.3, Q 7 (Flaw) Forum

[flash21]

In one study hospital patients ...

Argument Breakdown
• Laughter helps recovery
• Tendency to laugh = greater gains in immune system boost
• Therefore, those with greater tendency to laugh are more likely to be helped in their recovery even when they laugh less than the other patients when they laugh more

Assumption:
• But what if the people who laughed less ended up laughing MORE than the people who did NOT have the tendency to laugh a lot? Would the people who the higher tendency be better off, even though they laughed less?

Is this what (A) is addressing, or is my reasoning just wrong? Is it saying essentially that, what if, even if the tendency to laugh group laughed less ,and the other group laughed more, even in spite of this, they still in total laughed more?

Can anyone check out my thought process? Not sure if I even get this question.

[js1663]

First of all the argument in this question seems to begin with a flaw because they somehow skip from viewing comic videos to laughter. But that aside:

What they say is as follows:
1) Laughter aids in recovery from illness
2) Those with greater tendency's to laugh experienced greater gains

From the above two they assume that therefore, because they experienced greater gains, clearly they must be helped more by laughing than people without such tendency's.

Essentially, they're saying that it's the tendency to laugh more, and not the laughter, that's causing this difference in immune system improvement and therefore even if they laughed less than someone else who didn't have such tendencies, they might improve more than them.

a) says that this may be wrong because there's the possibility that due to their tendency to laugh (or for w/e reason), they laughed more, and since immune system improvement is correlated (and here it's posited causation even) with laughter, maybe they are just laughing more and that's why they are improving more. So it's not their tendency to laugh that's causing this difference in improvement, but their actual increased laughter that explains this difference.

As far as your reason goes, I think you are somewhat on target in that, the flaw is essentially that they are assuming that the patients who showed greater improvements and had a tendency to laugh laughed less than those without the tendency, when we don't know that. I'm not sure why you're putting them in groups when the study talks about individuals, but A is saying that maybe the assumption is false, and maybe they actually laughed more, therefore you can't put the blame on the tendency because it could be the laughter that's causing this (sorry if i'm just recycling what I said above).

[Christine (MLSAT)]

flash21, I think you're pretty on target here.

This is essentially a variant of the classic Correlation-Causation argument. As such, we could break down the argument core like this:

• PREMISE: High-laugh-tendency is correlated with greater-immune-improvement
  CONCLUSION: High-laugh-tendency must CAUSE greater-immune-improvement NO MATTER WHAT

As with all correlation-causation arguments, the author is assuming that there's not some intervening other cause. Now, many times, we'll see a 'third item' show up that causes BOTH the things correlated (I.e., it's not that A causes B, but rather than C causes both A and B). Here, we have a slightly different variant of the same idea.

This is hinted at with the phrase "even when they laugh a little" in the conclusion. The possibility that would totally destroy this argument is that it's really the laughter itself that's causing the greater-immune-improvement. So, it might be okay to say that a high-laugh-tendency will generally cause a greater-immune-improvement, it wouldn't be okay to say that it will do so EVEN WITHOUT the increased actual laughter.

Structurally, I could abstract this argument to this:

• PREMISE: A is correlated with B
  CONCLUSION: A must cause B, even when Q isn't present.

FLAW: overlooks the possibility that A might cause Q, which might in turn cause B. If that were the case, removing Q from the chain would destroy the causation.

I think you're closer than you think you are!

[flash21]

Thanks Christine this makes a whole lot more sense now. This is super subtle, I picked up on the cause and effect but couldn't quite see it clearly on this PT.

Thanks!