Prompt: EVIDENTIAL SUPPORT & CRITIQUE

The following appeared as part of an article in a business magazine.

"A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Of the advertising firms studied, those whose executives reported needing no more than 6 hours of sleep per night had higher profit margins and faster growth. These results suggest that if a business wants to prosper, it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

The correlation between the two categories 1) executives that require less than six hours of sleep and 2) firms with higher profit margins and faster growth, could be explained by a number of factors.  In the conclusion, the author simply assumes that the only explanation is a causal relation between these two categories.

The author assumes that the findings of the study of the Mentian advertising executives will generalize to other businesses.  However, it may be the case that the Mentian advertising executives are different in kind from other categories of business executives.  Applying the standards of the Mentian group to other groups may turn out to harmful.

Even in the case that the findings of the study do generalize to other businesses, the author’s conclusion assumes an overly broad application of the recommended hiring criteria.  But, surely, every business with a hierarchical organization will hire different people for different kinds of positions.  In other words, even if companies benefit from having executives that need less than six hours of sleep, there is no reason to assume that this criterion be applied to janitors and secretaries.  In the event that the study turns out to be valid and reliable, the author will need to adjust his/her conclusion to reflect this fact.

Finally, the implied definition of “success” in the first half of the quoted article is “high-profit margins and faster growth”.  However, the conclusion utilizes the term “prosper”, which may or may not denote “success”.  For instance, many folk would narrowly define success as “the accomplishment of a stated goal”; whereas “prosper” has the connotations of “well-being” and “longevity”.  This is evidenced by the well known folk  idiom, “live long and prosper”.  The author of the article assumes that the definitions of his terms are clear, providing us with little in the way of a standard to resolve the ambiguity.  Without such a standard, the author’s conclusion stands as equivocal at best, and at worst, intentionally deceptive.