#14- Concept Reference, Must Be True

[bli2016]

Having a lot of issues with this problem (and with this whole reading comp section in general, as you can probably tell). I eliminated A because the fact that the results would be more "interesting" with children is irrelevant, and I eliminated C because adults are not infallible in their access to their own thoughts. However, I could not decide between B, D, and E and had trouble finding evidence (for or against) each of these answer choices in the passage. Some help on how to approach this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Jonathan Evans]

Don't mention it, Bli. We appreciate your questions and your insights into your thought process here.

For this one, you should reread the first paragraph with the intention of identifying what makes children good candidates for these cognitive experiments. What is the distinction between children and adults? In what way does this distinction enable psychologists to make useful observations.

The evidence is on line 8: children, unlike adults, "misdescribe their own thoughts." These erroneous descriptions are key to making inferences, since otherwise (line 11) children "have the same thoughts that adults have."

Thus, a prephrase could be, "They make observable errors describing their own thoughts."

This is a good match for the credited response, (D).

I hope this helps!

[wrjackson1]

Hi, could you explain why B is wrong? when I read "give inaccurate reports of their thought processes," it made sense because adults were more likely to incorrectly say they weren't making inferences about their own thoughts. Where is the mistake coming from?

[Shannon Parker]

hi wrjackson1,

Looking at line 8 we can see that the author states that children tend to misdescribe their own thoughts, whereas answer choice B, states that adults are more likely than children to give inaccurate reports of their thought processes (misdescribe). Therefore, answer choice B is the opposite of the reason that the author puts forward.

Hope this helps.
Shannon

[sbose]

Hi!

Could you help me understand why E isn't correct? I picked E because I thought D was too strongly worded.

Specifically, I didn't pick D because I thought there wasn't really any evidence in the passage to prove that it's "easier to study" children. Also, the passage says children "are much less capable of identifying these thoughts," which I felt corresponded to the "less experienced" wording in answer E.

Is it D because it talks about general cognitive errors rather than talking about inferring others' thoughts?

Sorry for the rambling - hope my question made sense! Thank you for your help!

[Adam Tyson]

I personally think that answer D is not that great, sbose - but our task on the LSAT is to pick the best of the five answers, even if we don't love it. Answer E is worse than D because we have no information about how experienced or skilled children are at inferring the thoughts of others. We only know that they have a hard time accurately describing their OWN thoughts. E is completely without support. It's what some people might call "out of scope" (a term I don't like, but which is, in this case, appropriate.)

Answer D, about children making cognitive errors, is at least supported a little bit. If children are having the same thoughts as adults, but are less able to describe them, then they are making some errors in those descriptions. That could, perhaps, be due to "cognitive errors" (they are not mentally processing the information accurately). Then again, it could also just be due to having inadequate language skills, which is why I don't love the answer. But there's some support, and none for the other answer choices, and so it must win by default.

[LSATHopeful]

Can anyone please explain why answer choice B is incorrect?

The passage tells us that experts are more likely than non-experts to fail to recognize that they are inferring their thoughts simply because they make incredible fast inferences. Can't it be argued that adults are more likely than children to make faster inferences owing to their greater proficiency? If so, then adults are more likely to than children to give inaccurate reports of their thought process.

B is supposedly in contradiction to the passage because the passage tells us that children are more likely than adults to misdescribe their thoughts. However, does giving inaccurate reports of their process equal to misdescribing their thoughts? Couldn't one potentially misdescribe their thoughts yet give accurate reports of their thought process? What does misdescribe their thoughts even mean?

Thank you very much.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Hopeful,

We certainly can't show that adults are more likely to give inaccurate reports than children; the reason experimenters needed the children was to gain insight into mistaken reports. They could have done the experiment on adults if adults were more likely to be mistaken as they report. With adults, we don't have any evidence how and when they misdescribe their thoughts. Misdescribing thoughts just means that the reports of their thoughts are inconsistent with other information they provide, as in the experiment with the children. So the children think they are thinking thing "A" but they actually answer questions in a way that indicates they think thing "B." Let's use a simple example. The experimenter ask children their favorite color. A child answers blue, but when asked to point to his favorite color on a rainbow, he selects red. We have children misdescribing their own thoughts.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[impawsible]

Hello! I was wondering if using the negation technique was appropriate with this question (I noticed it's categorized as MBT, but negated answers I had narrowed to because I saw "reasonably inferred)? I negated the language of the choices to see which would weaken the argument and for E came up with:

Mental processes are sometimes easier to study because children are LESS likely than adults to make certain cognitive errors.

I didn't see how this phrase weakened the scientists' study/argument for inferential inner thoughts so eliminated it initially. So a few questions:

A) Should this technique have been used in this question?
B) If so, does this negation (or a corrected version of it if I did the above wrong) actually attack the argument?
C) Or should I have been looking at how lines 5- 6 of the paragraph "...[in certain circumstances] young children tend to misdescribe their own thoughts" parallel with "...certain cognitive errors..." in E and the negation technique in E would weaken the argument because it's looking for children to make errors in certain instances, yet this phrase says in those instances, children are not as likely to make the mistakes scientists are testing for?

Hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance!

[Adam Tyson]

You're actually referring to answer D here, impawsible, not E, so I'll assume that was a misdescription (but more likely a typo than a "cognitive error," right? )

Your negation is okay, although I would have chosen "not necessarily easier to study" rather than focusing on the likelihood of cognitive errors. But generally speaking I would not have used a negation approach at all here, because it's just too awkward to be helpful. The issue raised isn't conditional, and I tend to save the negation technique for claims that are clearly conditional.

That said, if you were to use a version of the negation technique on Must Be True or Most Strongly Supported answer choices in Reading Comp, you would want to think of the negation as conflicting with the information in the passage, rather than proving something wrong. The negation should not make sense in light of what the passage said. And in that sense, your negation does reveal D to be a good answer, because the passage says that children as "less capable of identifying these thoughts." Less capable than adults, or more likely to make mistakes than adults are. Your negation conflicts with that statement, which supports that answer as being a reasonable inference supported by the passage. So your analysis in C) in your post is spot on!

I think the simplest way to answer this question is to look at what we know about children from the passage. All we know is that they made more mistakes than adults make when describing their thoughts, even though they did accurately describe the things they were thinking about. In short, what we know is that they made mistakes. So if we are to infer anything about why they made good test subjects, it can only be something that has to do with their mistakes. We were told nothing else about them, so we can infer nothing else about them. Only answer D brings that up, so it must be the best answer.