acegmat1 wrote:
In a recent study of responses to visual images, researchers found that women most frequently gave the rating ‘most attractive’ to images of male faces that were more feminine in contour, and rated more masculine faces, on average, ‘less attractive’. The researchers concluded that modern women prefer men who are less obviously masculine in their facial features.
The conclusion would be most severely weakened if which of the following were true?
A. Facial features are not the criterion that most women use to decide whether a man is attractive.
B. The visual images were computer generated composites of photographs and not pictures of actual men.
C. The rating scale was a ten point scale with most attractive scoring 1-2 and least attractive scoring 8-10.
D. Most popular male actors have the features that the study allocated to the more masculine category.
E. The faces with the more masculine features were all significantly older than those with the feminine features.
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Please press kudos if you like this question
this is a weaken type of question.
to weaken the conclusion most efficiently, we can identify the conclusion and negate it.
the assumption here might be = facial features are the criterion used by modern women to decide whether a man is attractive.
negate it = facial features are not the criterion used by modern women to decide whether a man is attractive.
do you see the subtle change in meaning in answer choice A?
A talks about the majority = 51-100 of ALL women, while the argument says about ALL MODERN women.
what if the minority of women (1-50) are modern women?
A is out.
B - where the images were taken is out of scope.
C - what the rating scale was is out of scope.
D - popular does not mean attractive (sorry Ed Sheeran - thought right away about you, though u are handsome, no homo
)
E - yes! if faces with more masculine features were old, then of course women would select the young faces as more attractive.