#5 - A person with low self-esteem will be treated

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[HUSKYBINS]

Hi,
Just wonder if the correct answer only makes use of one of two facts to arrive at the conclusion: namely, by knowing the fact alone that low self-esteem people are more likely to feel being treated disrespectfully, we can conclude with that such low self-esteem people more frequently thinks they are being treated disrespectfully. If that is the case, then the fact that l.s.e. people are actually treated more disrespectfully is out there just for baffling everyone, isn't it?

Thanks in advance for your kind reply!

[James Finch]

Hi Husky,

Absolutely! This is a very common tactic that the LSAT uses in the LR section--add extraneous information and see if the test takers are able to filter out the wheat from the chaff and quickly identify the logic in the stimulus. Always check to see if the premises given actually link together, or if no linkage can be made with the information in the stimulus alone.

Hope this helps!

[ayachouaib]

Why is B incorrect. I narrowed it down to B and D but I had a hard time eliminating B?

[Jeremy Press]

Hi ayachouaib,

In these "fill-in-the-blank" questions where the blank you're being asked to fill is a conclusion (notice the blank has a "thus" indicator before it, meaning you're supposed to treat the blank as supplying a logical conclusion to the argument), the answer you select should be the one that is most strongly supported by the previous statements. In other words, you're treating the question the same as you would a "Must Be True/Most Strongly Supported" question. Answer choice B is incorrect because it states that there is a causal relationship between two things (low self-esteem and being treated disrespectfully) that, from the prior statements, we only know there is a correlation between: it tends to be true that low self-esteem people are treated disrespectfully more often. That correlation could easily provide support for other explanations: maybe a person's having low self-esteem is something others notice and and that causes them to treat the person disrespectfully. Or maybe the relationship is coincidental. Since we can't know the true explanation based on the stimulus, we cannot be at all certain that the causal relationship in answer choice B is true.

I hope this helps!

Jeremy