#9 - As part of a survey, approximately 10,000 randomly

[lilmissunshine]

Hello,

I don't think I fully understood the stimulus. Is it saying among the surveyed group, the older people are less willing to respond than the younger people? Or, as a person grows older, he/she is less likely to answer the survey questions? (Or neither?) I thought none of the answers was correct, as I was looking for something about correlational v. casual relationship. Could you explain it for me?

Thank you very much in advance.

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Lilmiss,

Thanks for the question! Well, it's both of those things, which is where the problem comes in. Let's take a look at it:

The first two sentences lay out a situation where when they talked to people about money, the older ones were more likely to refuse to talk about it (and by comparison younger people were not as likely to refuse to talk about it). By itself, we don't really know what this means, just that older people behaved in a different way than others. Then the conclusion comes in and makes a very specific judgment about what that data suggests, namely that the reason this happens is that when someone is younger, they're more likely reveal financial info than when they are older.

That very specific conclusion isn't borne out by the limited data we have in the premises, and so the question is: what is wrong with it? This is what the question stem reveals and is driving at. One immediate problem is that it takes a snapshot of how groups of people responded at a certain point in time, and then transfer those responses to make a judgment about how a person responds across a lifetime. That can't be done like that, and that's what we want to find in an answer.

Answer choice (A) gets to the heart of the matter by pointing out that we have no idea how the older people would have responded to the same question before. Maybe this is a generational thing, and they never would have given the info out no matter how much younger they were.

Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!

[lilmissunshine]

Thank you so much for your explanation! I just read the question again and it's very clear this time.

[ncolicci11]

Hi Powerscore,

I was stuck between A and C, ultimately choosing C. I understand why A is right, but could you explain why C would be wrong and what the test makers are trying to pull you towards with answer C? Is it wrong because although the author is saying age is likely to shift the likelihood of revealing information, the author does not explicitly state that it is the only reason?

Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

Answer C is a big shell game, ncolicci11! The conclusion was about how willing people are to TALK about their income and savings, not about how much income and savings they actually have. Answer C is about age related to income and savings - how much these people make and have in the bank - rather than age related to being willing to talk about those things. It's a totally different topic, and therefore this answer has nothing to do with what the argument did wrong!

[yenisey]

I see the answer choice E here "whole to part" flaw. I always confuse this flaw with the overgeneralization flaw. Is there a way to distinguish them easily?
Also, It says in the argument that older people within that 10,000 randomly selected sample are more likely to refuse to answer any of the questions over the phone. Then it concludes that older people are more likely to avoid answering questions over the phone. Why it can't be an overgeneralization flaw?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi yenisey,

The whole to part flaw assumes that what is true of the entire group, organization, etc. is also true of each part (or member, individual, etc.) of that group. For example, if I said "Team X is the best football team, therefore Team X must have the best quarterback."

The exceptional case/overgeneralization flaw involves making a broad generalization based on a small number of instances/examples. For example, if I said, "I know someone who smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day and lived to 100, so smoking isn't bad for people's health."

If anything, the overgeneralization flaw would be closer to the part-to-whole flaw rather than the whole-to-part flaw since it involves a broader generalization from a small sample.

The flaw here is not the overgeneralization flaw. First, the sample is 10,000 randomly selected people, which is not a small number in the overgeneralization flaw sense. The LSAT doesn't expect test takers to be experts on statistics and surveys, so you aren't expected to know the exact minimum number required for a survey to be valid. If they are going to use the overgeneralization flaw, it will involve a very small number so that it is obviously not enough.

In other words, the survey may actually show a correlation between a person's current age and their willingness to reveal personal financial information, but that does not mean that people become less willing to reveal personal financial information as they become older, as stated in the conclusion. In order to establish that, one would need to track the same people over different ages in their lives to see if their answers change over time. As Dave mentioned in an earlier post, it could simply be generational and that the current older generation has different views about sharing financial information than the current younger generation and those don't necessarily change as each person ages.