Reading Comprehension

PT10 · S3 · P4 · Q26 Civil Rights Movement Theories

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Years after the movement to obtain civil rights for black people in the United States made its most important gains, scholars are reaching for a theoretical perspective capable of clarifying its momentous developments.

Topic

Theories explaining the causes of the civil rights movement and the challenges in evaluating their validity.

Framework

Present Debate (with some Challenge Position, as political theorists critique classical theories)

Main Point

Scholars debate several classical psychological theories to explain why the civil rights movement arose, but these theories are criticized for oversimplifying complex motivations, and empirical evidence can be made to support any of them, making it difficult to test which—if any—is correct. (The most valuable sentences for encapsulating the main point appear in Paragraph 4: Also, Paragraph 5: )

P1: Search for Explanations

Scholars are still trying to figure out the best theory to explain the impressive achievements of the civil rights movement, and these discussions involve both psychologists and political theorists.

P2: Surveying Classical Theories

The author introduces three main classical psychological theories—rising expectations, relative deprivation, and J-curve—all of which connect social unrest to some unusual social or economic strain for black Americans before the movement.

P3: Detailing Each Classical Theory

Each theory gets explained in more detail: "rising expectations" says that progress just made people want more; "relative deprivation" says blacks didn't gain enough in comparison to whites; "J-curve" says things got worse after improving for a while, prompting protest.

26.

The validity of the “better test” (line 65) as proposed by the author might be undermined by the fact that

Correct
the press is selective about
Why this is right
As we said, the author seems to be assuming "If a theory is right, then an economic indicator that matched the theory should be followed by some movement activity, and that movement activity should be reported in the press". But this answer undermines that second assumption, that "if there's a protest movement activity, it will be reported about in the press". If the press is selective about which movement activities it chooses to cover, then there will be some protest movement activities that occur but get no press coverage. The author might look at a dip in black people's socioeconomic status, and think, "If J-curve were right, then we'd see a protest movement in response. But the press doesn't report any protest movement activity following this dip in economic status. So I guess J-curve is wrong." Meanwhile, this answer is saying, "Not necessarily. It's possible J-curve is right, and the dip in economic status did trigger some protest movement activity, but then the press just selectively chose not to report on it."
Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
63% picked this
not all economic indicators receive
Too Weak
This is a really vacuous statement because of how weak it is. Did any of us ever think it was possible that "every single economic indicator receives an identical amount of press coverage"? Of course not. So this answer tells us nothing we didn't already know.
12% picked this
economic indicators often contradict one
No Impact
This doesn't seem to have anything to do with undermining the author's methodology. Maybe a rise in wages for black people is a positive economic indicator but an even bigger rise in wages for white people is therefore a contradictory negative economic indicator. So what? The author wants to test rising expectations by seeing if a rise in black wages led to more protect activity being reported on. And she wants to test relative deprivation by seeing if a widening in the gap between black and white wages led to more protest activity being reported on.
3% picked this
a movement-initiated event may not
No Impact
The mere possibility that a movement event might not correlate well with any of the three indicators doesn't spell any trouble for the author's testing plan. That might just be showing us that none of the three indicators are correct descriptions of why protest movements occurred. She is just trying to test whether any of these theories seems correct. We're looking for an answer that would show her, "You can't reliable test the theories using this method".
17% picked this
the pace of movement-initiated events
Irrelevant Distinction: hard to anticipate
The author's testing plan has nothing to do with anticipating any future movement events. She wants to look at the historical record and see if she can find concurrences between an economic indicator changing (in a way that should "trigger" one of these theories) and an uptick in reporting on movement activity.
5% picked this

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