#23 - A study of adults who suffer from migraine headaches

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

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

The stimulus concerns a study of adults who suffer from migraines. The participants all experience excessive anxiety during early childhood, then migraines during adolescence, then depression during adulthood. The stimulus concludes that anxiety during childhood is one of the causes of migraine headaches and depression in later life.

The reasoning in the stimulus is very poor. Since you are asked to identify the flaw, you should probably focus on locating choices that describe cause-effect flaws or statistical flaws. This stimulus has far too many flaws in those areas for you to bother being overly specific, but you will need to be careful with your contender choices because of that.

Answer choice (A): This choice might have been attractive, but the relevant flaw is that the stimulus fails to identify the proportion of the population that experience the syndrome relative to the proportion that experience excessive anxiety as a child. This choice misses the point, and is wrong.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice. The stimulus presumes that out of the three events, one of the events (anxiety) is the cause of the other two (migraines and depression). In fact, it is possible that some fourth factor causes all three of those events, but the stimulus fails to consider alternative causes.

Answer choice (C): This choice is incorrect, because the argument's conclusion is altogether consistent with the evidence. The argument is flawed in that it is incomplete, but it does not have an internal contradiction.

Answer choice (D): The stimulus does not need to establish that the migraine sufferers in the study represent all migraine sufferers, because the stimulus merely concludes that anxiety during childhood is one of the causes of migraines and depression later in life. Whether or not these particular migraine sufferers represent others well, this group's cause would still be one of the causes of depression and migraines.

Answer choice (E): The argument does not need to establish why the study was restricted to adult participants. In any case, a careful reading of the stimulus makes the reason clear: the study used adults so that the medical histories of the adults could be used to trace the manifestations of a syndrome, if there was one. Using adolescents and children would have been misguided, unless the study were to go on for a significant number of years.

[AnnBar]

I thought answer choice C was a contender. Even though I identified the causal relationship it seemed the wording of answer choice C could have applied to the flaw.

It makes a generalization (anxiety in childhood is one of the causes of migraines) that is inconsistent with the evidence (the stimulus does not establish migraines are causes). In my head, the stimulus does set a sequence of events ( anxiety-migraines-depression) but it did not say anxiety was the all mighty cause. So in concluding migraines are the cause was inconsistent with the stimulus.

There is a 2nd part to my question. I have read that identifying how the flaws are usually described in answer choices is a good way to improve in Flaw in the Reasoning questions. Answer choice (C): is described as an "internal contradiction". Is it safe to assume that if I see similar wording to answer choice C on other questions it refers to "internal contradiction" flaws?

Thank you,
AB

[Kristina Moen]

Hi Ann,

Yes answer choice (C) describes an internal contradiction.

Here, there is no internal contradiction. We are told that most migraine sufferers have a syndrome, and then we are told a bunch of symptoms of that syndrome. The flaw here is that the author then inferred that one of those symptoms is a cause of the headaches. Note that this could be true. There is no internal contradiction. But an inference (conclusion) is something that must be true. Whenever you see causation in the conclusion, you should be thinking that you are seeing a flawed argument. It is very difficult to establish causation in a laboratory, let alone within 3-5 sentences on a test.

I want take a minute to note your explanation for being drawn to answer choice (C). "[the conclusion that anxiety causes migraines] is inconsistent with the evidence (the stimulus does not establish migraines are causes)." This is why so many test makers choose this answer choice (internal contradiction), and why it frequently appears as an incorrect answer choices. The premises does not establish the conclusion, but that's true of ANY flawed argument. It is not that the conclusion is inconsistent with the premise. For a conclusion to be inconsistent with a premise, that would mean that the conclusion and premise cannot both be true at the same time. For example, "Everyone should join my country club because it is exclusive!"

[Boudreaux]

Wouldn't the syndrome be the alternate cause? That's why I ruled B out.

I didn't see another answer choice at all and I'm kind of haunted by these rhetorical clues in other questions as well. Is it safe to say that when we see these cues and believe that the stimulus is trying to test us on one of these elements we learned in class, that's it. Don't over analyze?

I really feel like when I tell myself "I always get down to 2 choices and I always pick the wrong choice" this may be the reason. Do you hear this a lot?

Thanks,
Nick

[Jay Donnell]

Hi Nick!

I first want to try and help address one of the most ubiquitous student issues, the dreaded "I always get it down to two and I always get it wrong!"

That feeling has to be one of the most frustrating parts of LSAT prep, so I'm gonna try and walk back off that ledge with two responses:

1) Truth is, most students never really acknowledge how often they are down to two answer choices and then pick the right one! Since the wrong answers get the lion's share of review time/attention, which they totally should, it's easy to overly amplify just how often we end up on the wrong side of the 50/50 decision.

2) Perhaps a more useful/pointed piece of advice relates back to the most crucial part of LR success: knowing exactly what question type you're dealing with and the inherent good and bad traits of answer choices in that situation. For example, when faced with a 50/50 in a MBT question, you play with stronger odds in picking the answer with the weakest logical force. In regards to Flaw questions, as well as most any question involving an invalid conclusion, the most important factor is always how the answer choice affects the EXACT semantics of the conclusion.


For this particular question, the argument makes a fairly classic correlation to causation mistake. The unfortunate trifecta of maladies in this syndrome seems to have anxiety as the first issue, followed by depression and migraines, so the author concludes that anxiety is one of the causes of the other two symptoms. Even though anxiety shows up first, it's no proof that it has any causal impact, and may in fact very well be the first of the three effects to emerge as a result of some still yet unidentified cause. (If this question was from 2019 rather than 1994, an overuse of smart phones and/or social media comes to mind as a potential cause of all three things...)

When a flawed argument falls under this category, a short list of answer choice styles should come to mind:
1) correlation doesn't imply causation ( A and B being related doesn't prove that they are causally related)
2) temporal relationship doesn't imply causation (A happening before B doesn't mean A is causing B)
3) there may be an alternative cause that is actually responsible (A and B may be related, but maybe C causes them both)
4) there could be a causal relationship but the argument picked the wrong directionality (A might not cause B, B may cause A)


This response hits a bit of both # 2 and #3 in that though anxiety did happen first, it could still be an effect and not the cause.

To make a long story long..... keep your head up and always maintain a high priority for recognition of question types and the common patterns within them, and soon enough these convoluted rhetorical cues become more and more normal and easy to spot.

Hope that helps!

-Jay