Arguement 53 by kulewy531

kulewy531UID: 2603031

Argument 53
In the argument, the editor draws the conclusion that high level of melatonin before birth leads infants to shyness and this character exerts a long-lasting effect. To substantiate his conclusion, he cites the result of a survey on a group of testers. However the reasoning given by the editor suffers from many flaws.

First of all, the conduction of the survey is impropriate. The result of a survey would be convincing only when the quantity of respondents were large enough and the samples were picked randomly from the spectrum. In the survey mentioned by the arguer the sample only consists of 25 infants which is too few compared to the hundreds of thousands neophytes born each year. Furthermore, the study only concerns with infants who are distressed by unfamiliar stimuli and excludes other babies. Hence, these 25 infants are not picked up randomly. In addition, the survey lasts for 13 year, which makes it impossible for the preachers to rule out other factors. Learning from commonsense, the education of these babies exerts influences on their character. Because of the weakness mentioned above, the result of the survey is not compelling.

Admitted that the result of the survey is correct and representative, the concepts used in the result is misleading, since the definition of shyness is ambiguous in the argument. To be more specific, he considered the distress shown by the infants when confronting stimuli such as odor and unknown voice as shyness, while he regarded the teenagers who shows signs of distress and identified themselves as shy to be shy. Even supposed that those who identified them as shy are actually shy at the same time, the definition of shyness of infants and the definition of shyness of teenagers are not the same, since they are under different kinds of situation and their signs of distress are probably different. Hence the linkage between the distress of infants and the distress of teenagers are dubious.

Even assumed that the shyness of infants and teenager are the same, the cause-and-effect relationships between melatonin and shyness is not stable. In the passage, the arguer concludes that melatonin is the cause of shyness merely based on the fact that they happened sequentially. However the sequence of the events cannot confirm the correlation of the events without ruling out other factors. In fact, the mood of the mother, the condition of medical treatment and the physical condition of the mother might probably influence on the children’s character. Thus the assertion that increased level of melatonin is the cause of shyness.

Because of the flaws mentioned above, the argument is not a cogent and compelling one. In order to make it more convincing, the editor should conduct a more scientific survey which has a sufficient number of respondents, samples randomly, giving clear definition of concepts and ruling out order possible factors.