LR Question 24 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Sociologist: Research shows, contrary to popular…
QUESTION TYPE: Weaken
CONCLUSION: You’ll be happier without a pet.
REASONING: People without pets are happier than those with pets.
ANALYSIS: This argument makes a causation-correlation error. Just because people with pets are less happy doesn’t mean pets make them less happy.
It could be that sad people feel lonely and buy pets, and therefore drag down the average happiness of pet owners.
___________
- This could mean that three out of 90 million pet owners are happier than non-pet-owners. “Some” is very vague.
- Sometimes, I wish I had a dog. I’m not a pet owner. What does this have to do with whether owning pets cause sadness?
- This is vague. Non-pet-owners may be even happier than “reasonably happy”. We already know that pet owners are less happy on average. “Less happy” doesn’t mean “unhappy”. It’s a relative term.
- CORRECT. This shows that pet owners would be even less happy without pets. They’re less happy on average, but pets don’t cause the problem: they help make most owners happier.
Note: this isn’t a strong criticism, since “most” could be as low as 51%. But it does weaken the argument. - Everyone feels unhappy sometimes. This is useless. We only care about overall average happiness.
Recap: The question begins with “Sociologist: Research shows, contrary to popular”. It is a Weaken question. Learn more about LSAT Weaken questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.
More Resources for Weaken Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Weaken questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers weaken questions.
But doesn’t the passage say “all other things being equal”, which would normalize other causal factors of happiness/unhappiness? Couldn’t that also include things like loneliness level.
You’re right that “all other things being equal” means that they’ve controlled for other factors (which could include things like, say, depression). But that applies to the conditions at the tie the research was conducted. Not necessarily to people’s happiness before they got a pet. That means the study only shows that, in the measured moment, pet owners had lower average happiness than non–pet owners, after controlling for other factors.
Let’s imagine that pet owners averaged 6/10 happiness in the study while non-pet owners averaged 7/10. That would support the claim that non-pet owners are happier. But if those pet owners were at a 4/10 before getting a pet, the pet actually made them happier. So that would weaken the claim that avoiding a pet maximizes happiness.
This is the possibility that D raises. So the study doesn’t actually address how getting a pet affected the happiness of pet owners, only that they’re comparatively less happy than non-pet owners. But then uses that research to try to make a claim that pets make you less happy.
Hope that makes sense! Let me know if you have other questions.
Hi – but isn’t it implausible that the score of people before they acquired pets (4/10) would be lower than the average score of the non-pet owners (7/10). if all things are equal, then there would not be any difference between the two groups (non-pet owners vs pet-owners before they got pets (aka non-pet owners)) that would explain the purported score difference you are mentioning.
I think there are two key points you’re misunderstanding.
First, the study can’t control for people’s happiness or measure it before it begins (because the study hasn’t happened yet). That’s part of the issue. It’s entirely plausible that, prior to acquiring pets, pet owners were averaging something like 4/10 on happiness. The problem is that the study never actually recorded that earlier baseline. So when we talk about “all things being equal”, that condition only applies AFTER the study began, so it’s within the scope of the study itself. Before the study even started, there’s no telling what the conditions were. Because the study hadn’t started measuring. So anything’s plausible, including the right answer (D).
Second, I think you might be placing too much emphasis on the phrase “all other things being equal.” What that really means is that the study attempted to control for outside factors that could obviously skew happiness, things like bereavement, diagnosed mental illness, cancer, serious financial distress, etc. So, they likely picked people from similar financial backgrounds, health, social life, etc.
But it does NOT mean that everyone in the study began or ended with identical happiness. That wouldn’t make sense, because happiness is the very variable being measured. If the researchers had required everyone to start out equally happy, there’d be nothing meaningful left to test. They would have already ruined their study.
What the study actually did is quite simple (too simple, which is the issue). They took a group of pet owners and measured their average happiness, and also a group of non-pet owners and measured theirs. We know the average of pet owners was lower than non-pet owners. So let’s say again, that pet owners had 6/10 and non-pet owners had 7/10. Based on this, the sociologist concludes: Having a pet must make you less happy.
But that conclusion goes beyond the evidence. The study tells us nothing about how owning a pet changed the happiness of poet owners, because their happiness wasn’t measured before they acquired pets. When the study began, they already had pets. So if their average before getting a pet was 4/10, and it was at 6/10 at the time of the study (when they had a pet), then in fact the pet could have made them happier.
That’s why answer choice D weakens the argument. It introduces the possibility that pets make owners happier than they were before, even though the data shows owners are still less happy on average than non-owners.
TLDR: The study is just set up really bad if the aim was to discover whether pets make people more or less happy. They should have compared people BEFORE and AFTER getting a pet. Not people who have pets and people who don’t – people who don’t have pets will tell you nothing about how happy or unhappy a pet makes you, because they don’t have one.
Let me know if you have further questions!