#21 - Sociologist: Traditional norms in our society prevent

[ally.ni]

Hi!

I approached this question in a different way, and I am not sure if my approach is correct but it did land me with answer choice A. Could you please correct my thinking accordingly?

I diagrammed it as follows:
Premise #1: /sincere --> ignore unpleasant realities or ignore unpleasant realities --> sincere
Premise #2: /trust --> /succeed or succeed --> trust
Conclusion: Succeed -> face unpleasant realities (and then I connected the conclusion to the contrapositive of premise #1) --> sincere

From there on, I went through each of the wrong answer choices.
B) Sincere --> succeed, this is a mistaken reversal so I eliminated it
C) This answer choice is wrong given the stimulus because if using traditional norms, a community cannot succeed
D) /face unpleasant --> /sincere, this is also a reversal
E) the opposite of succeed doesn't necessarily equal failure

And this is how I narrowed it down to A, but I am not sure if this way of thinking is correct.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi ally,

Your first premise is mixing the concepts a bit. You could draw it as

Traditional norms ignore unpleasant realities AND tell small lies
Traditional norms sincere

Your second premise looks great!

Your conclusion is also fine.

Did you come up with a prephrase here? That would be the other step I'd like to see, particularly in a justify question.

Hope that helps!

[g_lawyered]

Hi P.S.,
After reading the various explanations I now see how I partially wrote out my conditional reasoning incorrectly. I didn't realize that sincerity meant to face unpleasant realities (not ignore them) AND to speak honestly (not tell small lies). However, I had a very difficult time evaluating answer choices as I narrowed down between B and D. I eliminated the correct answer choice. Can someone please explain (as posted in previous explanation) how we can connect/link to form this chain:
Success Trust Sincerity.

I thought it would form chain of: Success Trust AND Sincerity (because Success requires both trust and sincerity)

Can someone please explain why my reasoning for thinking answer choice B was correct. My reasoning:
Premise 1: Society NOT sincere ignore unpleasant realities and lie
Contrapositive: DONT IGNORE unpleasant realities (face them) OR NOT LIE (tell truth) Society Sincere

Premise 2: Members no trust society not successful
Contrapositive: Society Successful Members trust

Conclusion: Community successful members face unpleasant realities AND speak honesty
contrapositive: Members DON'T face unpleasant realities OR NOT speak honesty (lie) Community NOT successful

I chose answer choice B because it matched my contrapositive to premise 1 which I thought connected the new concept in premise and conclusion.
Also, this question took me a LONG time to complete because of the conditional reasoning. And the material I read in Lesson 4 indicates that sometimes in Justify Conclusion questions, the correct answer can be a contrapositive of the conclusion or premise. In this question, this wasn't the case. So my question is, how can we decide when to write out the contrapositives for the premises or conclusion and when not to do so? Since it is very time consuming.

Thanks in advance!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi GGIBA003

Great question here. It can be so hard to decide if you should diagram or not. Here's a few things I look for when deciding to diagram or not.

1) Is the conditional in the conclusion? I'll diagram that.
2) Are there multiple conditionals? I'll diagram that.
3) Does the conditional seem to link to other concepts in the stimulus, even if they are not conditionally stated? I'll diagram that.

Really, there are few risks to diagramming too much. First, you could assume something is conditional that isn't. That's a big problem, and will impact your accuracy. Second, you have to invest time in the diagram. This is a minimal risk, as ideally, it should be a very fast process for you to diagram. When I do, it's almost automatic. I don't spend time thinking about what I want to represent each term by. I don't have to stop long to figure out what is sufficient and what is necessary. You want to get yourself to that point.

Here, the reason we can't say that success is sufficient for both trust and sincerity is because we actually have more that we have to say. It's not enough just to say that success requires both trust and sincerity. We need to link in the concept of trust as a stage in the argument.

Here's the structure of what the argument gives us

P: Success trust
C: Success sincerity (as defined earlier in the stim)

What do we need to link? Trust to sincerity. Otherwise, we can't move from that premise requiring trust to that conclusion requiring sincerity.

Hope that helps!