If you’ve received Feedback on your Causal Argument, we’ve already started critiquing your causal claims.
But, if you’re still working on your Causal post, or if you’ve posted yours but aren’t confident you really understand how to structure a causal essay, the following descriptions of Causal Types might help.
Single Cause with a Single Effect (X causes Y)
“Facebook Can Cost Us Our Jobs”
The premise is that something supposedly personal, about which our employers should have nothing to say, is nevertheless available to our employers, and to prospective employers, if we make it so. What needs to be proved is that information about our non-work lives, or information we post to Facebook about our work lives, can keep us from getting a job, from advancing in a job, or from keeping a job.
- You may say that sounds illegal or unethical, but your objection is irrelevant to the causal argument.
- You could examine how different professions handle social media differently (for example kindergarten teachers might be fired for indiscretions that wouldn’t cost an insurance agent her job), because your topic is still what costs the teacher and the agent their jobs.
- You could argue that free speech should be protected if it’s true, and nobody should be fired for saying his boss cheats on his wife, but your objection is irrelevant unless there really are certain types of speech for which we can’t be fired and types for which we can (X causes Z, but Y does not cause Z).
- You could certainly make a good argument that employers have different policies regarding social media activities of their employees (X causes Y at Company 1, while X causes Z at Company 2).
Single Cause with Several Effects (X causes Y and Z)
“We Are the Casualties of the War on Drugs”
The premise is that the War on Drugs has been counterproductive, subjecting the nation to increased drug use and drug-related death. What needs to be proved is that government interference in drug production and distribution creates crime, interrupts quality control, causes disease, and kills users, traffickers, and innocent bystanders of the illicit drug trade.
- You could argue that the prohibition of certain desirable substances leads inevitably to a frenzied underground and by definition criminal enterprise to meet the demand.
- You could argue that criminals aren’t always scrupulous about the quality of the contraband they deliver and that their product often harms or kills.
- You could point out the countless people languishing in jails for owning small amounts of something that used to be legal.
- You might want to mention that drug use, even sanctioned use of safe prescription drugs, can be very detrimental in and of itself, but your comments would be completely irrelevant to the causal argument.
- You might also want to say that drug dealers get what’s coming to them when they deal in illicit materials and it’s wrong to blame cops for killing them, but again, that’s irrelevant to the question of whether the War on Drugs results in death.
Several Causes for a Single Effect (Both X and Y cause Z)
“There’s No One Explanation for Gangs”
The premise is usually employed to refute the “common knowledge” that a single cause can be blamed for an effect. If you’ve chosen a topic about which everybody “knows” the cause and effect, your causal essay will dispute the notion that there is in fact a single cause.
- You could produce evidence that gangs are more prevalent in public housing projects than in suburban neighborhoods, but with special care. You still won’t have identified the cause, only the location of the cause.
- You could produce evidence that a large majority of the kids in gangs come from families without a present, positive, male role model, but with great care in how you describe the situation, to avoid using misleading shortcuts like “kids with no dads.”
- You could describe gangs as often engaged in petty criminal activity or as pointlessly obsessed with territorial disputes, but it’s completely irrelevant to your causal argument to describe what happens after a kid is in the gang when you intend to prove why he joined it in the first place.
A Causal Chain (X causes Y, which causes Z)
“Failure to Prosecute Rape Causes Rape”
The premise is that rape occurs because it’s tolerated and that every resulting rape reinforces the sense that it will be tolerated. Rapes of female students on college campuses are routinely reported to campus authorities, not local police, and are kept from local law enforcement to protect the reputation of the school at the expense of the rights of the victim. What needs to be proved is that the rapes are in fact kept secret, that the assailants escape justice, and that there is local awareness that sexual assaults are not prosecuted or punished.
- You might want to investigate how it came to be that colleges got jurisdiction for sexual assaults on campus, but it’s probably irrelevant, unless you can demonstrate that they did so deliberately in order to keep assaults secret.
- You might want to explain what you think are contributing causes, such as the loss of bonuses or jobs for administrators on whose watch the public learned of campus rapes.
- You would need to argue that somehow, even though the outside world never hears of these rapes, students on campus learn that assault victims are not believed or supported and that assailants are not punished. This is essential to the chain.
- You could make a suggestion that if victims of rape refused to be “handled” by honor boards and campus judiciaries and took their cases to the local prosecutors instead they could break the chain. Arguing how to break the chain is a confirmation of why the chain continues.
Causation Fallacy (X does not cause Y)
“Violent Games Are Not the Missing Link”
The premise of this causation fallacy argument is nobody has yet proved a causal link between a steady diet of violent video games and actual physical violence in the lives of the gamers.
- You might be tempted to demonstrate that gamers are actually sweethearts who join the Boy Scouts and help old ladies across the street without knocking them down, but you don’t have to. You merely want to prove that they’re no more violent than players of other games.
- In fact, you don’t need to prove anything positive of your own to produce a strong causation fallacy argument; you only need to discredit the logic, the methods, or the premises of your opponents who think they have proved causation.
- For example, if an exhaustive study finds a strong link between kids who play violent video games and kids who kick their classmates on the playground, you argue this is mere correlation. It’s equally likely that the kids were violent first and attracted to the games as a result of their taste for aggression.
- You could also question the methodology of the supposed proof. If a questionnaire measures hostility, the answer: “I am suspicious of overly friendly strangers” no more proves hostility than it indicates a healthy wariness of the unknown.
Take-Home Exercise
Consider what you know about your own Topic and Thesis.
As a Reply to this post, make 5 brief Causal Arguments derived from your own research, as I have done above.
- Single Cause with a Single Effect (X causes Y)
- Single Cause with Several Effects (X causes Y and Z)
- Several Causes for a Single Effect (Both X and Y cause Z)
- A Causal Chain (X causes Y, which causes Z)
- Causation Fallacy (X does not cause Y)
A Model Exercise
(If your hypothesis is that the Pitch Clock benefits pitchers more than batters.)
- Single Cause with a Single Effect (X causes Y)
—The Pitch Clock encourages pitchers to go with their “gut instinct” on how to handle a batter instead of overthinking their next pitch. - Single Cause with Several Effects (X causes Y and Z)
—The time limit prevents pitchers from strolling the mound between pitches.
—The Pitch Clock reduces the time a pitcher and catcher can consult about pitch selection and the runners on base.
—The time limit prevents batters from leaving the box after every pitch to adjust their batting gloves and tighten their shoe laces.
—The Pitch Clock creates categories of pitchers: Fast Workers and Slow Adjusters. - Several Causes for a Single Effect (Both X and Y cause Z)
—Some pitchers have better stats since the Pitch Count because they work better on instinct than on deliberation.
—Some pitchers have better stats since the Pitch Count because batters can no longer disturb their rhythm.
—Some pitchers have better stats since the Pitch Count because they have adjusted to the time limit better than batters have. - A Causal Chain (X causes Y, which causes Z)
—Step A: Throwing a ball at 100mph puts a serious strain on a pitcher’s arm.
—Step B: With a time limit between pitches, pitchers can’t stretch their “recovery time” between pitches.
—Step C: Most pitchers have to back off on velocity since they can’t recover between pitches.
—Step D: Therefore, since the Pitch Count, most pitchers have suffered small but measurable overall velocity losses.
—Step E: Batters perform better against pitchers who can’t throw as fast. - Causation Fallacy (X does not cause Y)
—The fact that one pitcher has sped up his delivery pace WHILE AT THE SAME TIME improving his overall velocity by one-half of one mph, DOES NOT mean that Pitch Count CAUSED his added velocity, NOR DOES IT PROVE that “pitchers have added velocity to their game in the Pitch Count era.”
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Counterintuitive Spring 2024 
When the results for the mammograms were published internally for the radiologists to see it had taken a positive effect. The negative results for the mammograms were not hidden, which looks badly upon a radiologist if he had given a wrong result. This is in turn made the radiologists work harder in fear of messing up and having others know about it, because these results being shown shows how effective each are at their jobs.
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The difficulty of reading a mammogram is the cause of the “woeful” 65% success rate. The fact that trained professionals cant read them correctly every time shows that it is not an easy task. If reading a mammogram was easy, the success rate would be much higher. Dr. Adcock believed he could improve this horrible situation because of complaints he got about the low success rate. This made him think ‘There has to be a better way to do this’. That caused him to develop the new method of reading mammograms, which caused an increase in the success rate. Others radiologists took notice of this and adopted this method for themselves.
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The cause for Kaiser Permanente to adopt Dr. Adcock’s strategy was the increase in the success rate for the hospital’s readings of mammograms. Dr. Adcock’s strategy involved relieving hospital staff of their responsibilities for reading mammograms and having only a few designated doctors read the mammograms. This was first resisted by the hospital administrators because it involved unpleasantness when human resources had to fire doctors who were not deemed effective. They were forced to adopt his strategy because of the dramatic increase in lives saved and money saved by the simple idea.
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Dr. Adcock’s team is missing a lot fewer cancers, about one third, which is as highly accurate as a mammogram can detect, which is what experts are saying. This has occurred be Dr. Adcock had reassigned eight of his doctors because they were not reading enough films. Since they were not reading enough films, they were not training their eyes to become even more familiar with the tumors found. He reassigned these doctors because after realizing that one doctor had missed 10 cancers, he had fired him and eighteen months later, he fired two more doctors. He fired three doctors but he knew that he could not fire eight more doctors, which is why it lead him to reassign them. These decisions lead to the highest accuracy on finding tumors, so far, the team had detected.
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By keeping the radiologists responsible for their readings and then publishing them had a positive effect on the success rate. The radiologists didn’t want to have many mistakes since they would be published, so they started to pay more attention and reading more film.
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The one doctor who had missed a sizable portion of their readings was the underlying drive to the reform of mammogram procedures at Kaiser. One could argue that the cause of reform was Dr. Adcock himself, however he would be wrong. Dr. Adcock is merely the identity of the reform, the one who took all the credit. But what caused him to start the new procedures of failure shaming and firing doctors with less experience per year? It certainly wasn’t a spontaneous decision. Instead it was a thought that was accelerated by the catalyst that is the Doctor who had missed tumors on various occasions. Without this and other doctors’ failures Dr. Adcock would never have started trying to improve the system that has a grotesque success rate of merely 65%.
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What were the results of publishing the news internally for the radiologists to see?
The effects of publishing the news internally for the radiologists to see added significant improvement in radiology. The statistics of effectiveness for finding cancerous tumors positively increased everywhere with radiologists studying and working harder at their jobs. The cause was to improve the radiology staff team because radiologists all over the country weren’t doing a good enough job finding tumors. the cause was also to make radiologists more cautions of the work they were producing.
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Women would stop getting mammograms altogether if they knew how many cancers doctors missed in routine mammograms. Getting mammograms is suppose to benefit women’s health, so if they stop getting them it could hurt them. They could have cancer and not know it because they didn’t get the proper testing done. The doctors missing cancers in mammograms could make women lose faith in mammograms and discourage them from getting them done. Missing cancer in mammograms is just like not getting tested in the first place, so women might not get tested. If the doctors that are suppose to help us start to make mistakes, they become less trustworthy and people won’t listen which could put their health at risk.
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The low rate of success caused the radiologist to take action and fire doctors that were performing a poor job. Dr. Adcock believed this could be improved cause if anything is set with a consequence, the details would be fully observed. The abundance of mistakes by doctors, caused Kaiser Performance to change strategy and adopt one with better results. The publication of the results made the radiologists work harder and come up with better results, more care for their patients.
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The results of publishing the results internally caused the workers to achieve higher standards and become specialists in identifying tumors in mammograms. Putting the worker in a position where he could be embarrassed will cause him to perform better. When the worker can see his pass and fail rate at identifying mammograms, he will be able to realize what he has been doing wrong and fix it for the next time. Dr. Adcock did not want to see his team continue to fail at diagnosing tumors and by advertising the news internally he was successful in decreasing the fail rate.
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The doctors decision to publish the news internally forced radiologists to work harder, resulting in less mistakes in mammogram testing. The publishing showed both the progress that the practice has taken but it also reveals mistakes and slip ups if a radiologist did so. By publishing this it forced radiologists to double check their work in fear that they would make a mistake. It also gave the doctors an opportunity to see which radiologist makes the most mistakes, forcing them to become accountable for their mistakes. In result leaving the practice with better testing results and a better suited staff with less mistakes.
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What caused the low success rate of the doctors spotting breast cancers is their lack of proper training and use of old techniques and methods of detecting the tumors. Dr. Adcock took it into his hands to point out the individual breast cancer spotting rates of his doctors, not to expose them, but to get them to work harder in finding the cancers. It was not an assault on their skills as radiologists. He had a full team that would miss 4 out of 10 cancers. There is no point in having all these doctors if they result in low statistics. Infact, by reducing his team, this has resulted in higher success rates of mammograms. This tactic was a means to not only provide the best tests a patient can receive, but to encourage doctors to develop techniques in discovering breast cancers and to be thorough with their tests.
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Mammograms are difficult to read. This is one reason for the low success rate. However if a doctor is not equipped to handle the equipment efficiently they should not be running the procedure. This irresponsibility also ties into the last argument when they should be told to call patients back.
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The woeful 65% nation “success” rate for radioligist reading the mammograms was caused by the lack of ability and efficiency in ones profession. Without being diligent, careful, and keen enough to check and re-check things such as mammograms the large responsibility that radiologist have can not be counted on. If their practices are not going to be diligent and effective when someones lives are in their hands they should have lower rankings or be continuing on to better themselves, not trying to pass as something they are clearly not. Improvement in oneself is the only way to achieve bigger and better things, helping those affected. Dr.Adcock believed he could take a stand and better the system. He could not stand to see what was going on around him. He knew it would be risky but he had to take the risk. Kaiser Permanente adopted this risk to better itself as a whole and help more people. This is not only a gain for the people they help but for them personally to feel satisfied and fulfilled. Publishing this news would help other hospitals and radiologist conquer their flaws and change.
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Dr. Adcock believed that he could improve the 65% mammogram success rate because he knew that with a stricter regimen, his team of doctors at Kaiser Permanente could easily bring up such a lousy statistic. What also could’ve happened was that Dr. Adcock didn’t care whether or not it was possible to make improvements, he just knew he had to for the sake of keeping his job.
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The problem in reading mammograms that caused the woeful %65 success rate was that some people had a baseline test originally that would not show a starting tumor. The next time they would schedule an appointment it would be too late, causing them to miss a tumor. This would cause the patients to be too late to receive life saving treatment in some cases.
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The 65% national success for radiologists reading mammograms caused that many women to be misdiagnosed. As a result, around 40% of the who were diagnosed were in a unnecessary treatment or dyig thinking that they were cancer free. Therefore, Dr. Adcock came with a new alternative for the radiologists by publishing the mammograms and firing who ever missed a lot of cases. Consequently, the radiologists who were still working might attended to do a better job to keep their jobs and keep their reputation clean in the outside world. For Kaiser Permanente department probably more females were more confident to go to get their mammograms because only the good doctors were being left. Moreover, Dr. Adcock decided to start firing doctors who did not read enough mammograms because the process of attending as many patients as possible needed.
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