Q11 - Career consultant: The most popular

[martintp]

I dont understand why the answer is A? I dont see how this is overgeneralization... Also can someone disprove E for me?

[timmydoeslsat]

I would not consider choice A to be representative of describing an over-generalization. This stimulus goes from talking about emphasizing one's strengths to employers and
downplaying one's weaknesses.....to then saying how EMPLOYEES reacted to their managers implementing that advice.

The core of the argument can be seen like this:

There is advice that says to emphasize strengths and downplay weaknesses to employers.

+

A study of a bunch of managers shows that the reception of the self-deprecating humor used by managers towards employees was viewed in a positive light.

-------------> THEREFORE......

The advice is incorrect.


There are many things wrong with this stimulus! First, there is an assumption made that using self-deprecating humor is not a strength for a person. Perhaps the use of self-deprecating humor is emphasizing one's strengths!

Secondly, look at the words in bold. Isn't there a difference between using a technique to an employer versus using a technique as a manager toward your subordinates?

Of course there is! Those two situations are not equivalent. Actions of an employee (perhaps more than likely in this case, a prospective employee!) to an employer is not comparable to the actions of a manager to his subordinates.

Answer choices:

A) Fits our prephrase wonderfully! Different groups from premises to conclusion were used in the stimulus.

B) Tries to play on an idea of the self-deprecating being an issue in this stimulus. It is not. Even if the employees found the self-deprecating to be the positive aspect and not the humor, it still does not show why the conclusion of "advice is incorrect" is flawed. The reason it is flawed is because we go from comparing how one group is suggested to act towards another group, but then using a study of nonequivalent groups to lead to a conclusion of not following the suggestions. We just cannot do that.

C) It would not matter if non-self-deprecating humor would have been viewed more positively. Perhaps doing backflips would have been viewed even more positively.

D) It seems that all of these answer choices want to hone in on the idea of self-deprecating humor being the bad guy here. It is not.

E) There is one piece of career advice offered in this stimulus. It is the MOST POPULAR career advice. And it is to emphasize strengths while downplaying weaknesses. There are two parts to this advice obviously.

As I talked about earlier, the stimulus is assuming that the self-deprecating humor is the antithesis of downplaying weaknesses and not emphasizing a strength.

And it was given a favorable response.

If the study had been of prospective employees' actions toward employers, then we could give a soft conclusion about how the advice may not be sound. We could not flat out say that something is incorrect because there may be other studies out there to contradict that one.

[shaynfernandez]

What type of question is this?

[timmydoeslsat]

Identify the flaw.

[zainrizvi]

I got the answer but I didn't understand how to eliminate (E), I'm not really sure if (E) is a flaw at all actually..Could someone elaborate on that choice?

[noah]

First off, bravo to Tim - great explanation. I've changed the core a bit--I tried to boil it down a bit, which is often dangerous--added another assumption, and I tweaked the explanation for (E) in part in an effort to address the question about it.

Really clear thinking, Tim!

The core of the argument can be seen like this:

A study shows that employees liked it more when a bunch of managers used self-deprecating humor in front of those employees than when they didn't.

-------------> THEREFORE......

You shouldn't emphasize strengths and downplay weaknesses to employers.


There are many things wrong with this stimulus! First, there is an assumption made that using self-deprecating humor is not a strength for a person. Perhaps the use of self-deprecating humor is emphasizing one's strengths!

Secondly, look at the words in bold. Isn't there a difference between using a technique to an employer versus using a technique as a manager toward your subordinates?

Of course there is! Those two situations are not equivalent. Actions of an employee (perhaps more than likely in this case, a prospective employee!) to an employer is not comparable to the actions of a manager to his subordinates.

Finally, even if we ignore the shift from employers to employees, is being seen as even-handed, thoughtful, and concerned a good thing? Maybe this is exactly what the most popular career advice was trying to steer folks away from! Maybe it's best to be seen as ruthless!

Answer choices:

A) Fits our prephrase of the second gap wonderfully! Different groups from premises to conclusion were used in the stimulus.

B) Tries to play on an idea of the self-deprecating being an issue in this stimulus. It is not. Even if the employees found the self-deprecating to be the positive aspect and not the humor, it still does not show why the conclusion of "advice is incorrect" is flawed. The reason it is flawed is because we go from comparing how one group is suggested to act towards another group, but then using a study of nonequivalent groups to lead to a conclusion of not following the suggestions. We just cannot do that.

C) It would not matter if non-self-deprecating humor would have been viewed more positively. Perhaps doing backflips would have been viewed even more positively.

D) It seems that all of these answer choices want to hone in on the idea of self-deprecating humor being the bad guy here. It is not.

E) This is a tempting answer choice. The advice does have two parts: emphasize strengths and downplay weaknesses. So, does the premise critique only one part of it? Hard to say. Using self-deprecating humor is a critique of which? It could be seen as not doing either one: you'd be NOT emphasizing your strengths and you'd be NOT downplaying your weaknesses! Instead, what the premise offers is an example of someone doing something entirely different. (E) would be correct for an argument like this:

People say you should exercise and eat less to lose weight. However, exercising actually adds muscle mass, which adds weight. Therefore, the advice is completely useless.

As for the shift from "most popular" to "certain popular" I think it's OK since the most popular of a set can still be correctly called "popular."

[ptewarie]

Remember to stay on scope here concerning with the question asked.

This explanation might be for more LSAT geeks, but here is what's important:

The flaw, obviously is that the author infers from what is true about one group(employers) that it will also be true for a completely different group (employees). This is an unwarranted scope shift, and a classic LSAT flaw.

What makes this question difficult is some answer choices, such as
C and D.


Commonly on the LSAT, many test takers assume that the logical negation of something is the same as its opposite. Take for example if I say:
The apple is sweet. The logical opposition of this is "the apple is not sweet" . This is, however, NOT the same as saying that the apple is bitter. After all, the apple could be sour, spicy, smooth...etc.
The LSAT will often test if you fall into this trap in subtle ways.

Answer choice C and D attempt to do exactly this

C says that author fails to consider that non-depreciating humor could be viewed even more positively. Immediately, one can assume that if self-depreciating humor is " emphasizing one's weakness" than non self-depreciating humor is " emphasizing one's strength".

Thus if we say, sure people liked the "self-depreciating"(emphasizing one's weakness) humor, but they would have like the "non-self depreciating humor"( which we can think to be "emphasizing one's strength") then the original advice still holds and the author is wrong.

This is FALSE. We cannot infer "non-self depreciating humor" to be the same as "emphasizing one's strength". This goes back to my "apple is not sweet so it must be bitter" fallacy I mentioned before.

The way its worded now, thus, we can only see C to mean yes they could like non self-depreciating humor better. Since we cannot deduce anything about the fact that emphasizing one's strength is better or worse( our original scope), this does NOTHING for our stimulus.

OMIT.


B and D try to create the same trap.

Hope this helps.

[inesa909]

Hello,
I fully understand the logic gap in this flaw question, yet I felt that the wording on (A) was tricky (and possibly incorrect) because the stimulus only showed how the employees responded to the use of their manager's use of self-deprecation, but we are not given any information on how employers actually respond to it.
I would appreciate any clarification on this. I am probably just overthinking it.

[ohthatpatrick]

I totally get your paranoia, since this is pretty thin support on an explicit level ...
if someone says "it's incorrect to say that we should do X"
that doesn't necessarily mean he believes
"it is correct to say we SHOULD do the OPPOSITE of X"

But that's the sort of thinking we need to make (A) match. Although pulling that 2nd idea from the 1st one, in a vacuum, is a dubious inference, in the context of the whole argument, it is pretty safe.

Our conclusion is "research shows this advice to be incorrect", which we could rephrase as
"research shows that you should NOT emphasize your strengths to employers and downplay your weaknesses".

Is this a conclusion about how employers will respond to self-deprecation?

Ugh, kinda? It IS a bit of a stretch, but self-deprecation is "downplaying your strengths and emphasizing your weaknesses" so it's relevant to the career advice in the first sentence.

In context, we can infer that the career advice of "you should self-promote to employers" is suggesting that employers would respond WELL to self-promotion.

If our author says, "that advice is incorrect", then our author is suggesting that employers WOULDN'T respond well to that.

And (A) needs us additionally to believe that our author thinks that employers WOULD respond well to self-deprecation.

However, this is a pretty reasonable assumption to make given the context of the author's premise ... why would the author cite a study showing that self-deprecation was WELL-RECEIVED if not to imply that the employers would respond better to self-deprecation than to self-promotion?

Given that we're debating how you should act around your employer, and the author cites positive effects of self-deprecation, we're allowed to connect those pieces and believe that the author is tacitly endorsing self-deprecation around employers.

But I agree the answer is a bit of a stretch. In the end, sometimes we just have to pick the best answer, even though we know it's not written perfectly tightly.

[inesa909]

Thank you so much! That totally cleared up my confusion

[SamanthaW170]

I definitely see why A is right - and I struggled with this question because I didn't notice the employers-employees term shift. I eventually decided on C based on the following logic. Was just hoping someone could address this theory, since it's not exactly the logical negative error described above.

I took the idea that non-self-deprecating humor could be viewed more positively than self-deprecating humor to suggest that maybe it was the ~humor~ element of the self-deprecating comments that encouraged employees to see their managers as even-handed, etc. If employees love humor above all else, it's possible that being humorous about your strengths is perceived even better than when you joke about your weaknesses.

I liked that C addressed the humor aspect, which isn't described in the argument as either a strength or a weakness.

Thanks!