LSAT 150 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q11

LR Question 11 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Psychologists have found that candidates for top political offices…

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: If blinking judging affects elections, the effect must be bad.

REASONING: Voters judge politicians who blink a lot. Lots of features are important for political office: knowledge, confidence, etc. Blink rate doesn’t have direct importance.

ANALYSIS: The author ignores the possibility that blink rates are correlated with some other feature. You may know from outside knowledge that frequent blinking is considered a sign of low confidence.

___________

1. This sounds good, but the conclusion wasn’t whether judgements about debates were important. If was about whether the effect was good or bad. (So, it could be a very small effect, but still bad)
2. This doesn’t matter. The argument was only talking about the effect of prejudice from frequent blinking. That doesn’t go away even if there is an equal and opposite prejudice from the other direction.
3. CORRECT. Confidence is a factor in how well politicians perform. So, if blinking a lot signifies low confidence, then voters may be right to judge frequent blinkers.
4. This just shows a correlation between two relevant factors. It doesn’t tell us anything about blinking.
5. This tells us nothing about blinking. Knowledgeableness was only mention as a factor that was relevant to performance (in contrast to blinking, which was irrelevant).

Recap: The question begins with “Psychologists have found that candidates for top political offices”. It is a Weaken question. Learn how to master LSAT Weaken questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.