Q11 - Psychologists have found that candidates for top

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Weaken

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: If excessive blinking is hurting a candidate's election performance, that's a bad thing.
Evidence: Having an average blink rate is not the sort of feature that contributes to a political official's ability to do a good job.

Answer Anticipation:
We know voters think excessive blinkers do worse during TV debates than average blinkers. The author is worried that voters might hold this against a candidate, when excessive blinking in and of itself is completely harmless and unrelated to the task of good governance.

If we're trying to weaken this argument, we have to try to argue that "if voters end up being less likely to vote for an excessive blinker, that COULD be a good thing". My suspicion would be that they'd say something like, "People who are excessive blinkers are [some other negative quality that we WOULD want to vote against". It could recycle the ones it mentioned, like "Excessive blinkers tend to not be knowledgeable or confident"

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This has no effect. The author's conclusion is worded in a way where the author isn't convinced that there IS any impact. She's only convinced that IF there's impact, it's a bad thing.

(B) Out of scope. We need something that will help us argue that it can be good to vote against a heavy blinker.

(C) YES! I'm guessing most people wouldn't predict this answer as I did, but as long as we knew we were looking for "it can be good to vote against a heavy blinker", we would keep this on a first pass and hopefully pick it ultimately. The idea here is that heavy blinking isn't inherently bad (agreeing with the author) but voting against a heavy blinker could have a positive effect on election results, if heavy blinking is strongly correlated with lack of confidence (which could impede a political official's performance in office)

(D) This has nothing to do with helping us argue the value in voting against heavy blinkers.

(E) This might strengthen. The author wants us to base our voting behavior on stuff that matters like knowledge and confidence. If debate viewers notice heavy blinking (stuff that doesn't matter) and don't notice knowledgeableness, then this helps the author argue that the impact of debates could be bad for election results.

Takeaway/Pattern: If an author is concluding, "If X has any effect, it's a negative one", then we can't object by saying "X doesn't have an effect". You can only ever argue with the right side of a conditional. So we would get ourselves ready here by thinking, "How can I argue that if X has any effect, it could be POSITIVE?" In this case, we're saying "how could it be a positive thing if heavy blinking causes voters to vote against a candidate?"

#officialexplanation

[RaghavS939]

Isn't the conclusion "any impact this phenomenon has on election results is surely deleterious"?