An easy willingness to tell

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct76% picked this

   A person who lacks self-confidence will enjoy neither telling nor hearing funny stories about

   Why this is right

   This answer is phrased too black and white for me to like it on a first pass. We're told that being willing to tell jokes about yourself is the clearest indicator of self-confidence, but not that it's the only indicator. There might be other ways that self-confidence can be indicated. The stimulus was of comparative strength, but this answer is phrased absolutely like a conditional. Nevertheless, since this is a Most Supported question, our correct answer in the end doesn't have to feel perfect. It just has to feel best available. This answer says: No Self-Conf ? Don't Enjoy Telling/Hearing Jokes About Self Were we told the contrapositive, "If you do enjoy telling / hearing jokes about yourself, then you have self-confidence?" Ugh. Kind of. We were told that if you enjoy telling jokes about yourself, then that's the surest indicator of supreme self-confidence. Technically, the surest indicator just means the best available indicator, not a perfectly true indicator in all cases. But it's still very reasonable to think that if "X is the surest indicator of Y" then someone who is X is also Y. And the second sentence implies that enjoying hearing jokes about yourself is also a strong indicator of self-confidence. So if telling/hearing jokes about yourself implies self-confidence, then a person lacking self-confidence wouldn't have those traits.

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

   76%
2. B

   Out of Scope: jokes about others6% picked this

   People with high self-confidence do not tell funny stories or jokes

   The stimulus never discusses whether confidence people like telling jokes about others. The fact that it only mentions that they enjoy telling jokes about themselves doesn't allow us to think that they only enjoy telling jokes about themselves.

   6%
3. C

   Unsupported Causality: in order to13% picked this

   Highly self-confident people tell funny stories and jokes in order to let their audience know

   This answer speculates the causal backstory behind a fact we were told. We were told that highly self-confident people tell jokes about themselves, but we weren't told why they do such a thing. Perhaps it's to let the audience know that they are self-confident, but perhaps it's just to make other people laugh or make other people relax. The fact that joking about themselves indicates self-confidence doesn't mean that the reason people do it is to show off their self-confidence. Similarly, buying a gas guzzling car indicates a lack of concern about global warming, but we wouldn't infer that "people who buy gas guzzling cars do so in order to let their audience know that they are not concerned about global warming". They might just buy such cars because they like how they go vroom vroom.

   13%
4. D

   Too Strong2% picked this

   Most people would rather tell a funny story or a joke than listen to

   Too Strong: most Unsupported Comparison: tell vs. listen We don't have any claims in this stimulus that would justify using the term "most", which specifically means more than 50% of people. And the stimulus was about whether one enjoys telling or hearing jokes about themselves. We can't generalize more broadly about whether people would rather tell a joke than hear a joke.

   2%
5. E

   Out of Scope: respect3% picked this

   Telling funny stories or jokes about people in their presence is a way of expressing

   The concept of "expressing respect" is totally out of scope. We don't have any way to support that the motivation behind telling a funny joke about someone in their presence is a way to express respect for that person. It might be just the opposite -- to try to cut them down / make them seem less superior. A self-confident person could still enjoy such a joke because their confidence makes them invulnerable to the humiliation intended by the joker.

   3%