QUESTION TEXT: Psychologists recently conducted a study in which…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: Genetics lets us associate certain facial expressions with distinct emotions.
REASONING: Humans across cultures can associate certain facial expressions with distinct emotions.
ANALYSIS: This is a bad argument. It did correctly shown that humans are all able to match facial expressions to emotions.
But then the argument concludes that genetics are responsible. That’s possible, but not certain. Genetics aren’t responsible for everything.
___________
- If an actor looks sad, everyone will recognize the emotion. It doesn’t matter whether the actor actually feels sad. This is irrelevant.
- Same as A. This refers to the emotions people feel. That doesn’t matter. We only care about the emotions people recognize in others’ expressions.
- This would weaken the argument. The author says that behaviors common across cultures are genetically influenced.
- CORRECT. The negation is ‘behaviors common across cultures probably aren’t genetically predisposed’. That definitely hurts the argument.
- This doesn’t matter. The main point is that people from different cultures all recognized the same emotions.
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Michael says
in
LSAT 68, Logical Reasoning I, Q15
I feel like it should be A, I accept based on your explanation A is wrong. I still however struggle to realize D’s accuracy. Could you provide a little more clarification. I realize compared to the other 3 it is the most correct.
TutorLucas (LSAT Hacks) says
The reason that the argument in the stimulus is weak is that there is too wide a leap between the premises and the conclusion. The premises just say that it seems that individuals across cultures are good at identifying emotions conveyed by facial expressions. From this fact, the author concludes there must be a genetic predisposition to this ability — but there are so many possible social/cultural reasons for individuals to have this ability. We can’t just say it’s genetic because the ability exists.
(D) fills in this gap in the argument. It lets us more easily say that there are genetic reasons for this ability. If (D) is negated, then the argument is severely weakened because it makes it even harder to make a claim about a genetic basis for this ability.