#16 - Therapist: The ability to trust other people is

[rleung]

I am having a little trouble with this question especially when I diagrammed it. I thought it had a somewhat causal structure, so this is the way I was looking at it:

Trust other people --> Happiness

No Trust --> No meaningful connection --> Isolation

I arrived at D because of my diagram, which was:

Not Isolation --> Happiness

I arrived to this conclusion through looking at it like a contrapositive. Am I looking at this correctly or am I missing the point completely?

Thanks!

[Claire Horan]

Thanks for the question! This one is difficult--only 44% of test-takers get it right. You are right that the stimulus is the "sufficient and necessary" type. Your chains do have a mistake. Remember that they go if then or sufficient necessary.

"The ability to trust other people is essential to happiness" should be written as:
You have happiness You have ability to trust
You know this because "essential" and "necessary" are the same thing, and we write these as sufficient necessary.
The contrapositive is: no ability to trust no happiness
This part is the therapist's conclusion. We know that because of the word "for" before the premise.

The next statement is a premise that the conclusion is based on, "without trust there can be no meaningful emotional connection to another human being, and without meaningful emotional connections to others we feel isolated," can be written just like you did:
No trust no meaningful emotional connection to another human being ---> feel isolated

If we compare the two and try to reach all the way to the conclusion, we see that the premise fits inside the conclusion with the missing part of:
feel isolated no happiness
If this answer choices is not there, I will look for the contrapositive: happiness not feeling isolated. Only now do I take a look at the answer choices.

(A) No one who is feeling isolated can feel happy. This one can be written as: feel isolated no happiness, which matches with my prephrase, so this is the correct answer.

(D) is incorrect because it is a type of mistaken reversal. When you write your sufficient and necessary formulations, try saying in your head "if _____, then _____" and check to make sure it's true before relying on it.

I hope this was helpful!

[jessicamorehead]

Hey guys!!

I have a quick question regarding conditional logic. I diagrammed this problem correctly as the following:

Premise: NOT isolated meaningful emotional connection trust
Conclusion: happy trust

So I definitely see the gap between NOT isolated and happy. However, I always second guess myself as to which way the arrow goes between the gap. For instance, is it happy NOT isolated or NOT isolated happy? I see after diagramming it out that the first one would produce a split arrow, whereas the second one fits nicely into a chain. Is it safe to assume for justify questions that the connection will always go from premise to conclusion (ie NOT isolated happy)?

Additionally, could this problem also have been solved with meaningful emotional connection happy?

Let me know!
Jessica

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi Jessica,

Great job thinking this one through. Remember that you need to avoid a split arrow, and you also want to avoid branching (for the most part). Try to connect meaningful emotional connection happy to the diagram you had of the premise; does it get you to the conclusion? I think you'll find that you still can't connect them up. Rather than looking for an absolute rule, make sure you're always asking yourself, "What direction would allow me to complete this chain?"

[mirelisg14]

Hi,

I'm really thrown by this question. I understand that the proper conditional chains are:
H T
NOT I EC T

And I understand that in the contrapositive, the chains would be:
NOT T NOT H
NOT T NOT EC I

However, I don't see how happiness and isolation have a direct relationship here? Can someone pleaseeee help me understand? Is it because if you are isolated, then you do not have the ability to trust others, which is sufficient to not being happy? I took a power score class, but did not realize we could jump between conditional chains that share a sufficient condition.

[Daniel Stern]

Mir,

You're absolutely right, isolation and happiness don't have a direct relationship in the stimulus... and that's precisely the problem, and why we need sufficient assumption in answer A to Justify the Conclusion and relate the two elements.

Remember, it's not just two conditional statements: one is given as the conclusion, and one is given as the premise that supports it.

By definition, because we're doing a justify-the-conclusion question, our conclusion is sound. We just need to pick the answer choice that provides the assumption that gets us there.

So we have to relate the premise, which talks about feeling isolated, to the conclusion, which talks about happiness.

Answer choice A relates the two in the correct way.

I hope this helps. Good luck!
Dan

[hassan66]

Hi, I was wondering if there is a way to do this without diagramming the conditional logic? I circled the S and N words/phrases that appeared and found that trust appears twice, meaningful emotional connection appears twice but happiness and isolated only appear once. This signaled to me that the gap is between happiness and feeling isolated. I scanned the answer choices and eliminated B,C and E because they did not reference happiness and feeling isolated. Between A and D, I eliminated D because the stimulus didn't mention some/most or any other of those quantifiers.

Diagramming probably gives you the most certainty in selecting A because you can better visualize it but if you're short on time, could this work?

[Claire Horan]

Hi Hassan6,

Diagramming is just a way to quickly visualize relationships between concepts, so of course it's possible to do any problem without diagramming. You are right to look for the gap, which you correctly identify as being between happiness and feeling isolated. But I'd be wary of the counting method you describe; since it doesn't focus on the logical relationships, it would be easily prone to error (and testmakers could easily trick you). Whatever tools you use to answer problems should help you see the logic, rather than allow you to ignore it. My guess, though, is that it wasn't really the counting that led you to notice where the gap was, but rather your active reading. As to your question about whether this is a good shortcut, I suggest practicing with rigorous logic until you get faster rather than planning to take shortcuts that may lead you into a trap.

The rest of your method is perfect:

I scanned the answer choices and eliminated B,C and E because they did not reference happiness and feeling isolated. Between A and D, I eliminated D because the stimulus didn't mention some/most or any other of those quantifiers.

I hope this helps!

[gwlsathelp]

Why wasn't the Assumption Negation Technique used on the withouts?

[Robert Carroll]

gwlsathelp,

The Assumption Negation Technique would be inappropriate, as this is not an Assumption question. It's a Justify.

The Unless Equation was applied to the "withouts" to give the diagrams. Keep the "without" term, make it necessary, and negate the other term to make that other term sufficient. So:

premise: meaningful connection trust

premise: isolated meaningful connection

conclusion: happy trust

Answer choice (A): isolated happy

contrapose that:

happy isolated

Now the chain is complete:

happy isolated meaningful connection trust

Robert Carroll