Logical Reasoning

PT151 · S3 · Q5 A person with low self-esteem

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A person with low self-esteem will be treated disrespectfully more often than will a person with high self-esteem.

Background Ideas

Low self-esteem people will be treated disrespectfully more often than will high self-esteem people. (ouch, that seems like a vicious cycle ... that disrespect will make the low self-esteem people even more low self-esteem?)

Low self-esteem people are more likely than high self-esteem people to interpret a given way of being treated as disrespectful.

Fill-in-the-blank

Was the second sentence saying that the first sentence wasn't really true: low self-esteem people aren't really treated disrespectfully more often, they're just more likely to interpret treatment as disrespectful?

No, the first sentence is definitely affirming they are treated disrespectfully more often.

As an analogy, we might say that younger women are more likely than older women to be treated in some sexist way, but they are also more likely to hear the same comment as being sexist, compared to how older women would hear it.

So our conclusion needs to tie together the ideas that "X is being persecuted more than Y", but .

Goal

Let's look for a safely worded answer that maybe sounds like, .

I don't really like the latter half of that prediction, though, because who's to say whose interpretation is more correct: the high self-esteem or low self-esteem people's?

5.

Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?

  1. people with low self-esteem are

    Too Strong: usually

    We can't get this quantitatively specific and say that in more than 50% of cases, the low self-esteem people are correct in their interpretation of how they're being treated. The first sentence is compatible with the idea that 10% of the time low self esteem people are being disrespected, while only 6% of the time are high self esteem people being disrespected. Meanwhile, the second sentence is compatible with the idea that low self-esteem people think they're being disrespected 80% of the time. In that example, which is compatible with our background facts, the people with low self-esteem are usually wrong to think they're being disrespected.

    5% picked this

  2. being treated disrespectfully tends to

    Out of Scope: tends to cause

    There are no causal claims made here. This is just baiting students into adding our own speculative fun (as my brain was tempted to do when I summarized the first statement). It never says that being treated disrespectfully tends to cause lower self-esteem. Both facts are just statistical comparisons. Neither are causal.

    1% picked this

  3. if an individual has been

    Too Strong: probably because

    If we said "people convicted of prior felonies will have a harder time getting a job than will people without prior felony convictions", does that mean we can say ... If someone is having trouble finding a job, they probably have a prior felony conviction. Of course not. There might be way more people having trouble finding jobs for other reasons. Similarly, there might be way more cases where people are treated disrespectfully for some cause besides their self-esteem. So we can't make a broad generalization like, "disrespect is usually caused by low self esteem." This answer should also not seem too appealing since it would seem to only be using the first sentence for support, and on Logical Completion questions we're expecting the correct answer to synthesize the two ideas we've heard leading into the blank.

    4% picked this

  4. Correct

    people with low self-esteem more

    Why this is right

    Both ideas combine to guarantee this. To use my analogy from before, "if younger women are more often receiving sexist comments than are older women, and younger women are more likely to interpret a given comment as being sexist, then younger women are going to be thinking more often that they're hearing a sexist comment." Similarly, if low self-esteem people are more likely to be disrespected (in reality) and more likely to interpret a situation as them being disrespected (whether right or wrong), then they will more frequently be thinking, "I'm being disrespected".

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

    89% picked this

  5. a person with low self-esteem

    Out of Scope: treat disrespectfully

    The information given was only about likelihood of being treated disrespectfully or believing you're being treated disrespectfully. There was no information provided about treating people disrespectfully more often.

    0% picked this

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