Logical Reasoning

PT151 · S2 · Q14 Researcher: People are able to tell

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Researcher: People are able to tell whether a person is extroverted just by looking at pictures in which the person has a neutral expression.

Conclusion (we can conclude)

The ability of a person to tell whether a human is extroverted just by looking at a neutral picture of them is probably acquired as a result of primate biology.

Evidence (since / since)

Humans can also look at a neutral picture of chimp and judge whether that chimp is dominant.

Humans and chimps are both primates.

Evaluate

This argument has a couple layers, so it's hard to know what to focus on. It has some Explain Curious Fact, and it has some Argument by Analogy.

Curious Fact ... how can humans tell whether a human is extroverted just from a neutral picture?

Author's Explanation ... primate biology builds that perceptual ability into the primate brain. There are hardwired abilities in the primate brain to detect an extroverted face.

We could strengthen by ruling out an alternate explanation for how humans can judge "resting extrovert face". Or we could make the author's explanation seem more plausible.

The other layer here is the way the author seems to connect an ability to recognize dominance in chimps to the ability to recognize extroversion in humans. She's trying to make the case that since we have the ability to recognize X in a human face and Y in a chimp's face, then our ability to recognize X must be a primate thing.

The reason she's saying "it's a primate thing", rather than just "a human thing", is because she thinks that recognizing X and recognizing Y are somehow part of the same story.

But are those really related things? Is detecting whether someone is extroverted the same as detecting whether someone is dominant?

Goal

Let's look for something ruling out an alternate explanation for how humans can detect extroversion in a neutral picture, something increasing the plausibility that the extroversion-detection ability is genetic primate biology, or something making it seem like a human detecting extroversion in a human is connected to a human detecting dominance in a chimp.

14.

Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the researcher's argument?

  1. People are generally unable to

    Weakens (if anything)

    Since the author is spinning this yarn about a generalized primate ability to look at a picture of a fellow primate and diagnose extroversion / dominance, it would seemingly only hurt the argument to talk about one primate not being able to detect such a state out of another primate.

    1% picked this

  2. People are able to identify

    No Impact

    It's a pretty obvious statement that humans will see more personality traits in pictures of humans than in pictures with chimpanzees. Not only do humans have a wider range of personality traits to begin with (stemming from the increased complexity of our mental lives), but humans primarily live with other humans, so we also have greater familiarity with human faces. An answer that tells us a common sense fact can't really add anything new to our understanding. Some might even interpret this as weakening - if our photo-diagnosing ability is all about primate biology, then we should probably be able to perform similarly well with any primate. If our photo-diagnosing ability is all about an ability we acquired through culture, then we would do better with primates from our own culture (i.e. humans).

    2% picked this

  3. Correct

    Extroversion in people and dominant

    Why this is right

    This actually accomplishes two of our goals at once: - is diagnosing extroversion in neutral pictures of humans really parallel to diagnosing dominance in neutral pictures of chimps? Yeah, this answer says, they're connected. And they're connected in a way that increases the plausibility of the author's explanation that this photo-diagnosing ability is part of our primate biology. The two traits are indicators of a genetic predisposition to assertiveness. If extroversion and dominance are caused by our genetic makeup, then those same genes could plausibly cause our neutral faces to look a certain way that would be detectable by another member of our species.

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

    89% picked this

  4. Any common ancestor of humans

    No Impact

    This is one of those "Cool fact, bro" answers. We aren't interested in learning about the common ancestor of humans and chimps. It's already established that we have a common ancestor, since we're both primates.

    1% picked this

  5. Some of the pictures of

    No Impact / Too Weak

    "Some" is almost always wrong on Strengthen, Weaken, and Paradox, since it's such a weak quantity. If we say that "at least one of the pictures in the experiment was a composite of several different people", there's no real way to make sense of what effect that would have on this conversation. And because the quantifier is so small, even if we understood the effect of that information, it would be very slight impact.

    6% picked this

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