#10 - Decision makers tend to have distinctive styles. One

[cgleeson]

Hi,

I got this wrong and that is ok, however, I was able to go back and dismiss all of the answers....even A because I didn't get what it was saying. Now it's time to re-read question stem...I was ok with that, then re-read the stimulus....I had that down pretty good too. The only logical (for me anyway) is knowing for sure that B, C, D, and E are definitely wrong, process of elimination brings me back to A.....pick it and move on. I guess this is the best strategy?

[Robert Carroll]

cgleeson,

To some extent, an answer might not "look good" but might still not be something you're sure is wrong. Your confidence in that answer can be increased if you know the other answers have problems that make them wrong, whereas the other answer just...doesn't make sense, or seems awkward, or whatever. I think it's tough to like answer choice (A) at first in this question because it doesn't meet expectations - very few people are going to look at it at first glance and say "yes, that fits what I was expecting the correct answer to say." That's why it's written that way - it's right but unattractive, which wastes your time!

Read carefully!

Robert Carroll

[cgleeson]

Thank you Robert!

cgleeson,

To some extent, an answer might not "look good" but might still not be something you're sure is wrong. Your confidence in that answer can be increased if you know the other answers have problems that make them wrong, whereas the other answer just...doesn't make sense, or seems awkward, or whatever. I think it's tough to like answer choice (A) at first in this question because it doesn't meet expectations - very few people are going to look at it at first glance and say "yes, that fits what I was expecting the correct answer to say." That's why it's written that way - it's right but unattractive, which wastes your time!

Read carefully!

Robert Carroll

[Henry Z]

Hi,

I'm very confused about what D says. I chose D because it says decision makers "proceed in a way that makes it likely" they'll decide that way. I thought that meant decision makers made it seem that way, that what they argued made people think that way. No matter what their eventual decision is, if they've just argued for an idea, in people's eyes, it's likely they'll decide in favor of it.

However, many people here seem to just read it as decision makers will actually decide that way. What am I missing?

[katehos]

Hi Henry,

Answer choice (D) discusses the likelihood of a decision maker deciding in favor of ideas in which they do not actually believe. Sometimes these answer choices can be tricky to decipher, but what answer choice (D) is saying is specific to the decision makers, as opposed to any other people who might be observing the decision-making process.

Part of the reason we know this is because answer choice (D) does not mention other people's perspectives or the impression they get from hearing a certain decision maker's argument, rather, it discusses the likelihood of a decision maker deciding for or against an idea. In answer choice (D), the phrase "makes it likely" refers to how the process of decision making (in this case, the process from the stimulus is advocating for ideas they do not believe in order to see if their advisers have reservations about the idea that are similar to their own) increases the chances that the decision maker ultimately decides in favor of an idea they do not believe in.

Something that might be helpful to consider is the Fact Test, since this is a Must Be True question. Parts of answer choice (D) cannot be proven by referring to the facts in the stimulus. For example, answer choice (D) says they will "frequently decide in favor of ideas in which they do not believe," but the frequency of such decisions is not mentioned in the stimulus. We can use this same line of thinking to understand why you're noticing that people are reading that decision makers actually decide that way, since the answer choice discusses the actual likelihood of a final decision in favor of a type of idea.

Hope that helps!

-Kate

[ericsilvagomez]

Hi,

For this question, I changed my answer from D to C. After reading the explanation, I can understand why they are incorrect. Although I understood the logic behind A being the correct answer, what threw me off was when it mentioned "quoted accurately" because I do not remember the stimulus bringing up quoting. Can you elaborate on why that wording did not matter?

[Robert Carroll]

ericsilvagomez,

The stimulus doesn't have to say those words. The answer choice is introducing a hypothetical - if we were to quote people accurately, then, based on the stimulus, what would we know? We can do that in all sorts of situations. Take this example:

Stimulus: Anyone who wants to go to law school must take the LSAT or GRE.

Answer: If John wants to go to law school, he must take the LSAT or GRE.

We can't object that "John" wasn't mentioned in the stimulus. The stimulus shows that anyone who wants to go to law school has to do a certain thing, so saying that John is such a person entails that John has to do that certain thing.

So back to this stimulus, the stimulus is telling us that decision makers will sometimes argue for things they don't even believe, in order to gauge reactions. We can then say "if you repeated what they said word for word, it would not be a true reflection of their thoughts." That's certainly true - they aren't giving their true opinions.

Robert Carroll