#2 - For a television program about astrology, investigators

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Weaken. The correct answer choice is (E)

In this Stimulus, investigators for a television program found 20 volunteers born under the zodiac sign of Gemini to be interviewed and to take a personality test. This test confirmed the preconceived notion that folks born under the sign of Gemini were more sociable and extroverted than the average person. From this, they concluded that one’s astrological birth sign influences one’s personality.

In attacking the Stimulus, one should note some immediate weaknesses in the conclusion: the survey was not scientific; it contains a rather small group (20 people). Does the conclusion follow from the data collected?

The Question Stem reveals a Flaw in the Reasoning question type. Because we pre-identified weaknesses in the reasoning while reading the Stimulus, we are a step ahead of the game.

Answer Choice (A): This answer states that the flaw is because the test was not scored or administered personally by the administrators. So what? This answer choice should be quickly eliminated.

Answer Choice (B): This answer would confirm the reasoning done by the investigators in the Stimulus, although it uses astrologers to confirm that reasoning. Because this answer choice does not involve the reasoning done by the investigators, this answer choice should be disregarded and eliminated.

Answer Choice (C): This answer is a contender. It states that the investigators went into the survey with preconceived ideas and further investigation only confirmed those presuppositions. Since this is something that often occurs I would hold onto this answer choice as a contender.

Answer Choice (D): This answer discusses the proportion of people on the street that are born under the sign of Gemini than in the population as a whole. This would seem to fall under one of our pre-formed answers that the survey is not scientific and that the survey size of 20 people may have been too small but upon further reflection, it becomes so what? So what if there are a larger percentage of people on the street born under the sign of Gemini than in the population at large? This conclusion is about folks born under the sign of Gemini and their personalities, not whether or not they are relatively scarce compared to the population at large.

Answer Choice (E): This is the correct answer choice. It states that folks may not volunteer for the survey unless they are extroverts and sociable; thus there is a predisposition to survey folks who are extroverted and sociable. It’s not the zodiac sign that determines whether or not one is extroverted or sociable; it’s that you are more likely to volunteer to take this survey if you are extroverted or sociable. Comparing our two contenders, Answer Choices (C) and (E), Answer Choice (E) establishes itself as the better choice. Answer Choice (E) is the correct answer choice.

[andriana.caban]

Hi!

For my prephrase, I assumed that the participants lied about their astronomical sign, or, because it wasn't scored by the investigators that the producers exaggerated the claims or lied about the scores. Based on my prephrase, I chose answer choice (a).

I eliminated (e) because I figured the study wasn't focused on people who are not sociable and extroverted and therefore was irrelevant.

Can you please explain why my reasoning was incorrect, thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

Your prephrase was pretty good, andriana.caban, but it was perhaps a bit too narrow. Since this argument is based on the results of a survey, we should think about all the things that could go wrong with surveys. You hit on one of them - the respondents might not give accurate, truthful responses. But that's not the only potential problem with a survey. Others are:

Problems with who we asked. Did we ask enough people? Were they representative of the overall population of the group about whom we drew conclusions? Our explanation focused mainly on the size of the group, but anything that makes the group unrepresentative would be a problem. Maybe these weren't average Geminis, but special Geminis? Maybe only extroverted Geminis would agree to participate, so the group was skewed towards extroverts?

Problems with what we asked. Were the questions neutral, fair, unbiased? If the questions were biased in some way, that would hurt the value of the survey. There's no suggestion of that here, but if the answer choice suggested that as a possibility, we would have to like it.

Your selection of answer A doesn't really match your prephrase, nor is it one of the typical problems with a survey. The questions being asked by some third party (like a company hired to conduct the survey), or the results being scored by someone else, doesn't mean that anyone had to lie or exaggerate. So what if someone else scored it - they still could have done so accurately, and the data could still be good and useful so long as the group was representative, they gave accurate responses, and the questions were neutral. Answer A does not tell us that the respondents gave inaccurate answers to the questions asked, or that the answers were altered by the people doing the scoring. If anything, having a neutral third party doing the legwork might help to reduce bias on the part of the people doing the research!

Answer E is all about the unrepresentative nature of the people who were surveyed. If anti-social people won't agree to participate, then the population that did agree to participate is not representative of all Geminis! We only surveyed the extroverted, sociable ones, and then concluded that the whole group was sociable and extroverted! In short, E describes a problem with who we asked, which is a classic weakness in questions about surveys.

One last thing: on behalf of introverts everywhere, we are NOT anti-social! The rest of you just wear us out quickly and we need to go be alone for a while to recharge our batteries. We might hide under the bed for a bit, but we'll come back and party with you later.

[andriana.caban]

Wow that makes perfect sense now that you explained in more detail!

I think I was making assumptions about answer choice A instead of reading it literally. So, I was assuming that because the test was not administered or scored personally by the investigators, respondents could very well exaggerate or lie. However, the answer choice doesn't tell us if the respondents actually lied or not. As such, this doesn't necessarily weaken the author's position, although it could.

[lsacgals101]

Complete Question Explanation

Weaken. The correct answer choice is (E)

In this Stimulus, investigators for a television program found 20 volunteers born under the zodiac sign of Gemini to be interviewed and to take a personality test. This test confirmed the preconceived notion that folks born under the sign of Gemini were more sociable and extroverted than the average person. From this, they concluded that one’s astrological birth sign influences one’s personality.

In attacking the Stimulus, one should note some immediate weaknesses in the conclusion: the survey was not scientific; it contains a rather small group (20 people). Does the conclusion follow from the data collected?

The Question Stem reveals a Flaw in the Reasoning question type. Because we pre-identified weaknesses in the reasoning while reading the Stimulus, we are a step ahead of the game.

Answer Choice (A): This answer states that the flaw is because the test was not scored or administered personally by the administrators. So what? This answer choice should be quickly eliminated.

Answer Choice (B): This answer would confirm the reasoning done by the investigators in the Stimulus, although it uses astrologers to confirm that reasoning. Because this answer choice does not involve the reasoning done by the investigators, this answer choice should be disregarded and eliminated.

Answer Choice (C): This answer is a contender. It states that the investigators went into the survey with preconceived ideas and further investigation only confirmed those presuppositions. Since this is something that often occurs I would hold onto this answer choice as a contender.

Answer Choice (D): This answer discusses the proportion of people on the street that are born under the sign of Gemini than in the population as a whole. This would seem to fall under one of our pre-formed answers that the survey is not scientific and that the survey size of 20 people may have been too small but upon further reflection, it becomes so what? So what if there are a larger percentage of people on the street born under the sign of Gemini than in the population at large? This conclusion is about folks born under the sign of Gemini and their personalities, not whether or not they are relatively scarce compared to the population at large.

Answer Choice (E): This is the correct answer choice. It states that folks may not volunteer for the survey unless they are extroverts and sociable; thus there is a predisposition to survey folks who are extroverted and sociable. It’s not the zodiac sign that determines whether or not one is extroverted or sociable; it’s that you are more likely to volunteer to take this survey if you are extroverted or sociable. Comparing our two contenders, Answer Choices (C) and (E), Answer Choice (E) establishes itself as the better choice. Answer Choice (E) is the correct answer choice.

Hi, I am having trouble understanding why/how answer C is a contender. Could you help me?

[Jeremy Press]

Hi lsacgals101,

This is a good question, and I'm glad you raised it.

When looking at answer choices on any given question, for every person who takes the test there is one credited answer (the "correct" answer) and four answers that are not credited (the "incorrect" answers). However, for different people on different questions, there may be differing contenders. Sometimes something that a student of mine identifies as a contender is not something I would initially identify as a contender. And that's partly because people "see" different things in different answers. That's one of the many reasons I love teaching this test: if you talk to a lot of people about it, it exposes interpretive flexibility, and forces you to be more precise about your reading and understanding of arguments and language! Sometimes the same person sees different things in different answers on different reads of the test. The key at the end is that we identify the credited answer, however we get there.

The original poster on the thread is saying that, one of the problems we sometimes see in study-oriented scenarios is that the preconceptions of the investigators dictate (or inappropriately impact) the results or conclusions of the study. To that person reading quickly through the answers for the first time (remember, a contender is simply an answer that cannot be definitively eliminated on a first read through the answer choices), it may have seemed that answer choice C was raising that issue and thus should not be eliminated too hastily.

But, answer choice E comes along later and really nails down a very strong problem in this survey context, the problem of the representative nature of the sample of 20 being surveyed. So, for a person who kept C as a contender, that very strongly on-point answer should cause them to go back and get a little more precise with their read of answer choice C. At that point, I imagine it would become clearer that preconceptions did not, and could not, inappropriately dictate the outcome of the study here, because those preconceptions were actually confirmed, not based on the investigators' assumptions or biases, but rather based on the more objective source of the personality test.

I hope this helps!

Jeremy

[saygracealways]

Hi PowerScore,

Upon reading the above explanations, I understand why (E) is the correct answer because it confirms that the sample was unrepresentative.

While initially solving the problem, however, as I read "that the investigators surveyed 20 volunteers born under Gemini and concluded that they are more sociable and extroverted than the average person," I immediately thought the flaw was that they didn't survey any OTHER person under a DIFFERENT birth sign. How could they then conclude that people under Gemini are more extroverted and sociable than the average person?

Hence, I chose (B) as the answer choice - People born under signs OTHER than Gemini have been judged by astrologers to be much less sociable than those born under GEMINI. Could you please help me understand why (B) is incorrect? Upon relooking at the answer choice I do realize that "judged by astrologers" may be irrelevant here because the stimulus mentions investigators only, but not sure if there's a stronger reason why this answer choice is not correct.

Many thanks!
-Grace

[KelseyWoods]

Hi saygracealways!

The investigators might have had some pre-existing data that gave them information about the level of sociability and extroversion for an average person--it's likely that data exists from earlier studies that did not think to differentiate respondents based on their astrological sign. So the biggest problem with answer choice (B) is that, as you point out, it refers to the judgments by astrologers rather than the judgments by the investigators. The question stem specifically asks us to identify a flaw used in the method used by the investigators so that's a pretty big issue with the answer choice!

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[livgrala13]

For anyone who was also torn between C and E, another pointer that helped me to distinguish why E was the better choice was the last statement of the stimulus. The word influences to me indicates causality, so the flaw in the conclusion is this causal claim. Although it could be a flaw that the investigator was confirming his original impressions, the flaw in the conclusion is creating this cause-effect. Answer choice E directly attacks that by providing another cause for the same effect.

Something that also stood out to me after completing the question and reviewing was that the Q stem asks for the "most serious flaw." So, in a way, it is acknowledging there may be more than one flaw, but we are asked to indicate the most serious flaw.

Hope this helps someone arrive to their own understanding of the question!