Taken for a Spin
Dec 21, 2010
Brain, Child - Let’s say a study finds that teenagers who watch a lot of television also tend to score poorly on the verbal sections of their SAT exams, an example that Alan Reifman, a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University, uses hypothetically to illustrate the logical fallacy. Can you conclude that watching TV causes weak language skills? No. A correlation does not point to a cause, even if—and here’s where it gets tricky—it makes perfect sense that rotting your brain in front of Jersey Shore would erode your ability to get through Moby Dick.
tags: Texas Tech in the News