Logical Reasoning

PT146 · S2 · Q22 In a recent study, one group

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In a recent study, one group of participants watched video recordings of themselves running on treadmills, and a second group watched recordings of other people running on treadmills.

Conclusion

Watching a recording of yourself exercising can motivate you to exercise more.

Evidence

In a study, the people who watched a recording of themselves running on a treadmill reported exercising, on average, 1 more hour per day than the people who instead watched other people run on a treadmill.

Evaluate

This is a typical Curious Fact / Explanation kind of setup. Curious Fact: How come the ones who saw themselves in the video report exercising more than 1 hr more than those who saw other people exercising?

Author's Explanation: Watching yourself on video exercising motivates you to exercise more, so these people who watched themselves during the study had new motivation to exercise, increased their exercise regimen, and now average 1 hr more of exercise.

You'll notice I'm filling in a lot of blanks for the Author. That's a good habit when we're trying to understand the Causal story that they're selling. We always react to Curious Fact arguments with the same two questions:

How ELSE could we explain the Curious Fact? What could help us assess the plausibility of the Author's Story?

Most correct answers that weaken a Causal argument provide a different way to explain the background data. Why else could the group that watched themselves be exercising 1 hour more? Maybe that group was just already exercising 1 hour more on average. The language of the argument doesn't say that they've increased their amount of exercise. Maybe that group did increase their exercise, but not as the result of this experiment. Maybe a disproportionate number of that group recently hired personal trainers, and that is the reason why they're exercising 1 hour more. Maybe they live in a climate that's more conducive to exercise.

If we wanted to weaken the plausibility, we could say stuff like, /

Goal

Pick an answer that gives us a different way to explain the Curious "1 hr extra" Fact, or an answer that undermines the story that watching yourself exercise motivates you to exercise more.

22.

Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?

In another study, people who
Irrelevant Comparison: lifting vs. running
We care about the distinction between watching yourself exercise and not-watching yourself, but this answer would help us evaluate the difference between watching yourself lift vs. watching yourself run. We're not interested in that distinction.
2% picked this
Another study's members exhibited an
Weakly Strengthens
This is too distant a situation to have much impact, but it actually seems to strengthen the plausibility that seeing / hearing about yourself (or someone you identity with) doing X leads to an increased motivation to do X yourself.
4% picked this
Participants who were already highly
No Impact
Since we don't know how highly motivated participants were initially divided up into the experimental groups, learning about what highly motivated participants are / aren't doing doesn't help us clarify anything about the possible differences between the two groups we care about: those who watched themselves and those who watched others.
42% picked this
Correct
In studies of identical twins,
Why this is right
Oh, hello, Nightmare! You're going into the vault of correct answers I detest. This definitely cracks the Top 20 for me. Since the causal-difference maker in the Author's Hypothesis was whether you watched yourself vs. someone else, LSAT feels like if we're talking about studies of identical twins, watching an identical twin is essentially a fair proxy for watching yourself. (I definitely think any identical twin you ask would say, "Sure it's similar in some ways, but it's VERY different from watching myself". But LSAT just needs it to be relevantly similar) If you swap out "observed their identical twin" with "watched themselves", you get an answer saying, "in other studies, participants who watched themselves read tended to significantly overreport how much time they read in the near future." This suggests an alternate explanation for the data in the exercise study: the reason that the group that watched themselves run a treadmill is now reporting, on average, 1 hr more of exercise per day than the group that watched others isn't because watching yourself motivates you to actually exercise more; it's because watching yourself inclines you to overreport how much you do something in the days or week that follows. This answer does do the expected: it provides an alternate explanation for the Curious Fact. It just does so in such a stupid, overwrought LSAT way that it's like they knew they needed to create a Level 5 question.
Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
49% picked this
A third group of participants
Strengthens
This reinforces the author's causal story, since it offers more data points in which watching yourself do X inclined you do to more X.
4% picked this

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