How to Decide Between Two Answers on the LSAT
If only it were this easy...
I just finished reading an interesting book, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. One of the more interesting studies that he cites involved choosing between five posters. Three were humorous cat posters (i.e. the internet!), and One poster was a cute photograph of a cat cute cats, one was a Monet, and the fifth was a van Gogh. The folks in group A was simply asked to choose a poster to take home. Plain and simple. Group B was asked to do the same thing AND were asked to explain their decision. What do you think happened?
Group A tended to choose the Monet or van Gogh posters, while Group B went for the kitties. That’s interesting! And then, a few weeks later, Group B folks were generally far less satisfied with their choices than the Group A people. The hypothesis is that forcing people to explain their thinking led them to choose the poster for which they could more easily provide a reason. Apparently, it’s a lot easier to explain why we would want a cat in our dorm room than a Monet.
So what does this mean for the LSAT? One interpretation is that you should simply go with your gut. Sure, that makes sense. Don’t over think the decision – and definitely don’t think you can out-smart the LSAT. Instead, do what the LSAT is asking of you: make the inferences, grasp the argument, etc.
However, I think the more useful takeaway for the experiment above is that we should practice explaining why LSAT answers are right or wrong. The easier it is to verbalize why a tricky wrong answer is wrong, the easier it will be to eliminate it (and vice versa for the right ones, of course). If all you can say about a wrong answer is “it’s just wrong,” you’re more easily fooled — you don’t have a sophisticated grasp of the ideas that the LSAT is testing, and so you are more easily tempted into choosing the cat poster answer.
So, what to when you’re down to two? Obviously, there’s no silver bullet here. Saying “go with the less obvious one” fails, as does “go with the more obvious one.” What also rarely works is to compare the answers to each other. Instead, compare them to the argument, question, or text. The questions you should be asking yourself are not about the differences in the answers but how each one relates to what you’ve been given. Does the answer address the core of the argument? Is there textual support?
To be blunt, if what you’re saying to yourself is “I always choose the wrong one” you’re still not done learning the basics (and you’re probably ignoring all the times you choose the right one!)
Get to work on explaining yourself and apologies to cat fans.