Argument76 同主题作业

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Argument76
The following appeared as part of an article in a health and beauty magazine.
'A group of volunteers participated in a study of consumer responses to the new Luxess face cream. Every morning for a month, they washed their faces with mild soap and then applied Luxess. At the end of that month, most volunteers reported a marked improvement in the way their skin looked and felt. Thus it appears that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of facial skin.'

Article:
The article presented above is seemingly sound. Based on the results of a study of new Luxess face cream on a group of volunteers, the author declares that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of facial skin. To support his conclusion, he cites some details of the study as evidences. However, from my point of view, the argument is seriously problematic for some critical falses in the study itself.

First of all, the participants of the study is open to doubt on the representativeness and psychological effects. The subjects of this study is not chosen with a random sampling process, but a group of volunteers, which is not helpful to identify the effects of this product to different kinds of facial skin. Moreover, common sense tells us that volunteers who would like to take a test of new face cream products are most likely to be those who have the hope deep inside to improve the condition of their facial skin. This kind of strong expectation would probably influence their judgement to the effects. Therefore, a ice cream study on volunteers is not good enough for any rational customers.

In additional, the process of the study is also not acceptable. From the argument we know that the subjects have to use mild soap to wash their faces before applying Luxess. It's impossible then for us to tell whether the mild soap or the Luxess itself makes any change, if any, to the subject's facial skin. Besides, because this is a study on volunteers, there is no way for Luxess to watch over all the subjects so that they won't use any other makeup that would affect the result of the study. As a result, any result from such a study could be too unreliable to be tenable.
Finally, The result itself of this study is vague and questionable. The author doesn't provide us the exact percentage of the volunteers who felt improvement on their skin. With a mere "most" we can't tell the real satisfying rate of the whole subjects. In addition, the feeling of volunteers about their skin would be too subjective to present the real effects of the face cream. There are some potential possibilities that the facial skin of these volunteers didn't make any improvement as they sense so, for example psychological factors, which should never be simply ruled out. After all volunteers are not experts of facial skin. On top of those, a month is not long enough to tell the real effect of the face cream in the long term. The fact that so many questions remain unanswered to the study results is such a slap in face to the hasty conclusion the author reaches.

In the final analysis, this argument is not persuasive as it stands. To make it more convincing, the study has to be redone with randomly selected subjects, the process of the study has to be redesigned to rule out any possibility that would affect the testing result, while the result of the study has been to measured in a more scientific and objective way. To better evaluate the statement, we would need more detailed information about the subjects and the testing results.