Logical Reasoning

PT145 · S4 · Q4 Film director: It’s inaccurate

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Film director: It’s inaccurate to say that filmgoers stayed away from my film because it received one or two negative reviews.

Curious Fact

Why did this film have such a small audience during its opening weekend?

Director's Explanation

It wasn't because it had a couple negative reviews. It's because it was competing with several other films that share the same audience, and it's a pretty small audience.

Evaluate

Whenever we're evaluating an author's causal hypothesis for a curious fact, we have two different pressure points to consider: 1. Alternate Explanations for that curious fact 2. the plausibility of the author's explanation

Goal

Since this is Strengthen, we want an answer to either

rule out an Alternate Explanation for why this film had such a small audience during its opening weekend (e.g. "There wasn't a terrible storm that kept people from going to the movies that weekend)

or

increase the plausibility of the author's explanation (e.g. corroborate the story that the intended audience for this film was split between seeing this film and seeing several other films meant to appeal to the same niche).

4.

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to support the film director's explanation?

  1. The film director’s film received

    Weakens

    This adds plausibility to an Alternate Explanation (the film had a crappy opening weekend because of the bad reviews it received), so this would weaken.

    0% picked this

  2. Correct

    Filmgoers seldom see more than

    Why this is right

    This adds some plausibility (although not much!) to the author's causal storyline. The director thinks that her audience (let's pretend it's young people from 14-22 years old) was probably torn between seeing her film and the several other ones that were targeted at that age group. We might object to this storyline by saying, "Why should that mean a bad weekend for your film? Couldn't they just see those other movies and your movie, all in the same weekend?" And this answer rules out that objection. It basically makes it seem like if there are four movies out that target the same audience, then, all other things being equal, each of those four movies will only get 25% of that audience to its film in a given weekend.

    Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    92% picked this

  3. The total number of filmgoers

    Weak Impact

    This seems to somewhat rule out alternate explanations for why her film had a small audience that would fall in the category of, "There was a storm / there was a pandemic / it was the weekend of the Superbowl". In other words, this answer would be saying "the film didn't have a bad opening weekend because that weekend just happened to be bad for all movies". So it does strengthen somewhat, by ruling out a broad category of alternate explanations. But LSAC usually thinks that increasing the plausibility of the author's explanation is more powerful than ruling out some alternate explanation. (It's hard for us to register that (B) has much strengthening power, though, because it's such a common sense notion that you rarely see more than one movie in a weekend.)

    3% picked this

  4. Each of the other films

    Weak Impact

    This does a little to increase the plausibility of the author's explanation as well, but if we negated (B) vs. negated (D), the negated version of (B) would weaken more than the negated version of (D). If these competing films didn't receive one or two positive reviews, they would still be on equal footing with what we know of the director's film (all we know is that the director's film got one or two negative reviews). The director's hypothesis that her film had a weak opening weekend because of these competing films doesn't depend on the idea that these competing films were better reviewed by critics. It's really just a hypothesis that a small audience got divided up into smaller chunks, because some saw her movie, some saw competing movie A, or B, or C. Meanwhile, if you negate (B) and think that filmgoers often see more than one movie in a given weekend, then it's much harder to argue that "because some of this film's audience saw competing movies A, B, or C, that means they wouldn't see this film during its opening weekend."

    3% picked this

  5. Most filmgoers are drawn to

    No Impact

    We're not concerned with what's true of most filmgoers, because this film has a relatively small niche audience.

    2% picked this

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