My topic is based on Christopher J. Ferguson’s article about “soda and scientific pile-on effect”. Mr. Ferguson is associate professor and department chair of psychology at Stetson University. He used the relationship between soda and obesity as an example to show the scientific pile-on effect. The scientific pile-on effect is taking about how scientists like to make or even make up data analysis to make their opinion more valuable. In this article, Mr. Ferguson showed to us step by step how the relationship between soda and obesity gets more and more seriously caused by the scientific pile-on effect.
At the beginning of the article, he talked about how people usually relate obesity and soda together when there is some but not too much relationship between these two. As showing his logos concept in this article, he brought out the research that was done by Shakira Suglia, Sarah solnik and David Hemenway with the concern of teen aggression and soda to mark that soda is one of the attention problem about young children. Events are always the best way to track how things work. In order to make his argument more related, in the same paragraph, Mr. Ferguson used the ban on large-sized soda in New York City to back up his opinion. Both the two studies are just the beginning of the study of the relationship between soda and obesity. Thus these two events in Mr. Ferguson’s opinion are the origin of this scientific pile-on effect. Then he used another example to show the study of soda and obesity is getting more attention, the Journal of Pediatrics study. The study was well done, and they conclude that soda somehow does affect teen’s aggression. However, since the data was collected on a certain area of people, so the data base does not represent general situation. This study grabs Mr. Ferguson’s attention, he is interested about how and why people are taking the soda and obesity problem to a high and high level. Are the scientists really interested in the study this...