#17 - Psychiatrist: Psychological stress is known both to

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning, CE. The correct answer choice is (B).

The stimulus presents as fact that a causal relationship exists between psychological stress and two distinct effects of that stress, negative emotions and impaired physical health. From this premise of a cause having two effects, the argument concludes that reducing one of the effects should reduce the other effect, which is an invalid claim. Reducing or removing the common cause should reduce the effects, but there is no reason to believe that the effects have any causal relationship with each other.

Answer choice (A): A classic shell game of an answer, this one almost gets it right, but the problem is that it describes two causes having one combined effect, whereas the stimulus is about one cause having two effects.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice. The flaw in the stimulus, as outlined above, is perfectly described in this answer. Two effects need not have any causal influence on, or relationship with, each other.

Answer choice (C): An attempt to baffle us by adding conditional language! But again we have an answer that describes two causes, when our argument is about two effects of a common cause.

Answer choice (D): Yet another answer that treats our effects (negative emotions and impaired physical health) as if they were presented to us as causes. At this point in going through the answers you might start to doubt yourself about what was the cause and what were the effects, but if you went in with a strong prephrase and confidence in yourself you should be able to keep brushing these backwards answers aside.

Answer choice (E): This answer may be the most attractive wrong answer in the bunch. It goes wrong when it treats negative emotions as a cause (" a condition that causally contributes"), because in the stimulus the premise did not treat it as a cause, but only as an effect (of psychological stress).

Every wrong answer to this question describes something that did not happen in the stimulus, and a correct Flaw answer must be an accurate description of what occurred in the stimulus. In other words, it must be true. Reject answers that incorrectly describe what happened!

[mguitard]

Hi!

I answered E in this question and got it wrong. I think I understand why B is correct and E is wrong but wanted to check my reasoning.

Stimulus:
"Psychiatrist: Psychological stress is known both to cause negative emotions and to impair physical health. This suggests that overcoming such negative emotions when they arise could cause one's health to improve."
I diagrammed it for visual understanding like this:
Psychological stress causes negative emotions
& causes impair physical health

psychiatrist is assuming:
overcoming negative emotions may cause health to improve
B: it presumes merely, on the basis that two conditions that have a common cause (negative emotions and physical health impaired caused by psychological stress), that one of these two conditions can causally influence the other (negative emotions influencing physical health)''

Is this train of thought correct?

thanks so much!

[Luke Haqq]

Hi mguitard,

Yes, your reasoning is correct! In aiming to get questions like this correct, a couple strategies are worth noting.

First, whenever one sees a causal relationship, it's worthwhile not just to diagram it out as a conditional statement, but also to write a "C" and "E" above the sufficient/necessary conditions to remind yourself that it's conditional reasoning but more specifically causal reasoning.

Second, when testing contender answer choices, it's important to match up generic descriptors in the answer choice with what is actually going on in the stimulus. Thus, answer choice (E) claims that the stimulus "takes for granted that removing a condition that causally contributes to another condition suffices to eliminate the latter condition." Here, you could put in brackets/parentheses at "a condition" and "another condition," and it'd become clear that the stimulus doesn't make a claim about one condition eliminating the other. Your reasoning shows that you were already using this method for the sake of testing out/confirming answer choice (B), so keep up the good work!

[katnyc]

For this answer I chose C. would you please be able to go over all of the answer choices. I understood the casual relationship but when I was reading the answer choices. I found myself guessing. Thank you so much

[Adam Tyson]

Hey katnyc, check out the top post in this thread - we have now added an explanation. Thanks for prompting us to do so!