Logical Reasoning

PT3 · S4 · Q9 An easy willingness to tell

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An easy willingness to tell funny stories or jokes about oneself is the surest mark of supreme self-confidence.

Statements

Causal-ish The clearest indicator that you're supremely self-confident is if you're very willing to tell funny stories or jokes about yourself.

Comparison This willingness to poke fun at yourself is a clearer indicator of self-confidence than is your willingness to have others poke fun at you.

Evaluate

The second sentence is barely telling us anything new. After all, once we say "the surest indicator is X", then by definition "X is more revealing than (anything else)".

Since the clearest indicator of self confidence is poking fun at yourself, then by definition

The fact that people often don't acquire this willingness until late in life is a very wishy-washy quantifier. "Often" is similar to "Many". There are definitely at least a handful of cases, but it doesn't mean that this is necessarily true in most cases.

We could combine the first sentence with the "not acquired until late in life" and derive something like, .

Goal

Hard to say what the correct answer will be saying, but it seems likely that it will make use of the very strong claim in the first sentence.

Which one of the following inferences is most supported by the statements above?

Correct
A person who lacks self-confidence
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% picked this
People with high self-confidence do
Out of Scope: jokes about others
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% picked this
Highly self-confident people tell funny
Unsupported Causality: in order to
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% picked this
Most people would rather tell
Too Strong
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% picked this
Telling funny stories or jokes
Out of Scope: respect
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% picked this

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