LSAT 120 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q11

LR Question 11 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Historian: One traditional childrearing practice in the nineteenth…

QUESTION TYPE: Must be True

ANALYSIS: This is a great question. Choosing the correct answer demands a full understanding of the stimulus, so let’s examine it.

Psychologists believe that putting a child in the corridor would damage the child’s self-esteem. They also believe that damage to self-esteem will make the children less confident when they become adults.

Yet the final sentence tells us that children raised with this regime were not less confident as adults. Clearly, the psychologists are incorrect. Their reasoning had two steps:

Corridor ➞ damaged self-esteem ➞ less confident

We don’t know where they are wrong. Maybe loss of self-esteem doesn’t lead to decreased confidence. Or maybe it does, but being put in the corridor doesn’t lead to a loss of self-esteem. This ambiguity means we cannot choose answer choice A.

___________

1. The psychologists could be correct about loss of self-esteem, but incorrect that being placed in the corridor causes a loss of self-esteem.
2. “Some” could be 1-3 adults in each case. This could be true or not true – it’s not a certainty.
3. We don’t know this. Maybe people drew the correct inference every time.
4. Even if low self-esteem causes a loss of confidence (we don’t know if this is true), it doesn’t follow that high self-esteem causes high confidence.
5. CORRECT. Yes. If the psychologists’ belief about self-esteem were true, then the traditional practice did not cause a major loss of self-esteem. We know this because children raised the traditional way were just as confident.

Recap: The question begins with “Historian: One traditional childrearing practice in the nineteenth”. It is a Must be True question. Learn how to master LSAT MBT questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.