Logical Reasoning

PT108 · S2 · Q17 Two hundred randomly selected subjects

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Two hundred randomly selected subjects were asked, "Have you ever awakened, seemingly paralyzed, with a sense of a strange presence in the room?"

Statements

In one group of 200 random people, 40% said they have awakened, seemingly paralyzed, with a sense of a strange presence in the room.

In a different group of 200 random people, 14% said they remembered awakening and feeling seemingly paralyzed.

Evaluate

There are only two facts, and we know our job on Inference is to combine 2 or more facts, so we're trying to think about what can be derived by considering both of these data points.

Essentially it comes down to this: Group A: 40% have experienced (A + B) Group B: 14% have experienced A

A = waking up seemingly paralyzed B = waking up sensing a strange presence in the room

If this were the same group of people, then they'd be contradicting themselves. Clearly if 40% of people in a group have experienced A + B together, then at least 40% of them have experienced A.

It has to be more common (or at least as common, to be technical) to be A than to be A and B. That's a general rule of probability. After all, everyone who is A and B is A.

The number of people who are lawyers and former professional baseball players has to be smaller than the number of people who are lawyers.

So there is a weird tension between the study's two data points. We would expect a higher % of people saying "I've awakened feeling paralyzed" than people saying .

But it's too hard to predict what we should be inferring from this. It's possible that is actually a pretty common feeling (40% of people experience) it. Waking up feeling seemingly paralyzed is pretty uncommon (only 14% of people experience it). And the 40% from Group A might have been saying mainly because they knew they had felt that strange present thing before, and maybe they just convinced themselves that they also felt seemingly paralyzed in that moment (perhaps the fear we experience from sensing a strange presence makes us paralyzed by the indecision of what we should do about it).

Goal

Let's head to the answers with that uneasy, but not uncommon, feeling of not knowing what we're looking for. Look for something safely worded that can be defended using the comparison between the two groups.

17.

Which one of the following statements is most supported by the information above?

Experiencing a sense of a
Goes Against Second Data Point
This answer is somewhat tempting on a first pass. It feels like a reasonable attempt to explain the mismatch between the two study results. Again, there's no way that being "A and B" can be more common than being "A", because everyone who is "A and B" is by definition "A". There's no way that being a lawyer and a softball player can be more common than being a lawyer, because everyone who is a lawyer and a softball player is by definition a lawyer. So if waking up feeling paralyzed only occurs in 14% of the population, then it's funky to be hearing that 40% of people say they've awoken to feel paralyzed and sensing a strange presence. One possible way to explain that would be to say, "they really only awoke to feel the strange presence, but then the strange presence made them feel paralyzed". However, if 40% of people wake up to feel a strange presence (and if feeling a strange presence makes one feel seemingly paralyzed), then 40% of people would say "Yeah, I can remember waking up and feeling seemingly paralyzed". But when people were asked strictly about that phenomenon, only 14% said they had experienced it. So this answer doesn't work as an "explanation" that would help us reconcile the two results.
5% picked this
The number of subjects who
Out of Scope
Out of Scope: control group's other response We only know what % of the control group has awoken to feel seemingly paralyzed. We have no idea what % of the control group has awoken to feel a strange presence in the room (we don't even know if they were ever asked that question), so we have no basis for comparing the number of subjects in each group who have experienced 'strange presence'.
8% picked this
If the reports of the
Too Strong: never One-Claim Support
We know that 60% of the first group had never awakened to feel both seemingly paralyzed and a strange presence. 40% of people in that group have awakened to feel both. It's possible that another 15% of those people have awakened to feel a strange presence (but not seemingly paralyzed). That would mean that 55% of people in the first group has awakened to feel a strange presence, and only 45% of people in that group have never awakened with to sense a strange presence. It should unnerve us that supporting this answer would only involve looking at the first sentence of the paragraph. It is extremely rare for the correct answer on Must Be True or Most Supported to only pull support from one claim.
8% picked this
At least some of the
Too Strong: inconsistent
This is saying that some of the subjects contradicted themselves in what they reported ("inconsistent" claims are contradictory claims). But we have no reason to think anyone contradicted themselves. There are two different groups of people. The responses from one group might clash with the responses of the other group, but that doesn't mean that any individual subject contradicted themselves.
4% picked this
Correct
The tendency of subjects to
Why this is right
This represents a safer version of (A). It has incredibly weak language ("sometimes"), and it allows us to reconcile the disparate findings. It seems like waking up to feel paralyzed only happens to about 14% of people. So why did 40% in group A say they remembered waking up, seemingly paralyzed, with a sense of a strange presence in the room? We can speculate reasonably that they focused on the part of the question they did remember (40% remembered waking to sense a strange presence) and then agreed to the question, even though they might not have remembered feeling seemingly paralyzed. The description was close-enough to something they remembered that they said they remembered that experience, but in reality they didn't "remember" being paralyzed, they just convinced themselves such a thing had happened because they DID remember the accompanying circumstance of sensing a strange presence.
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
76% picked this

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