Q17 - Studies of the relibiality

[mrudula_2005]

Hi,

Okay, so this argument has me totally lost.

If there is no relationship between the confidence the witness has in the account and the accuracy of that account, and if there are certain factors that can raise or diminish a witness's confidence with 0 impact on the accuracy of the identification, why is it concluded that police officers are advised to disallow suspect lineups in which witnesses can hear one another identifying suspects??!?! So what if overhearing what other people claim to have seen during those suspect lineups raises the confidence of witnesses...that has 0 impact on the accuracy of their identifications (which is presumably what the police are after) so why are the police being advised in the first place to disallow that type of lineup situation?? The conclusion just seems totally irrelevant considering the fact that essentially nothing (confidence-wise...little confidence or too much confidence) bears on the accuracy of an eyewitness's testimony in the end.

More than anything I am trying to understand the logic and situation behind this argument...many thanks in advance!!

[aileenann]

Hello there!

So, in part, I think you are totally right. There is not a ton of logic connecting the premises and the conclusion - but what that points to specifically is some big assumption you have to figure out for yourself to understand how this argument works!

I think you might want to broaden your understanding of the argument a little bit. Yes, the police of course want eyewitnesses to be as accurate as possible, but if something doesn't affect their accuracy there could still be other concerns here. Perhaps even if the eyewitness can't be made more accurate, we don't want to unduly increase their confidence from situational factors. I think that is what is going on here. It's one thing to have a problematic eyewitness, but he becomes that much more problematic as he becomes more confident without having reasons to increase his confidence. Does that make sense?

Once that makes sense, might you feel up to the challenge of posting your analysis of each of the answer choices on this board? That's a great test/learning opportunity

[mrudula_2005]

Thank you!

Yeah if the concern then is to not have an overly confident witness, then I clearly see why a strengthening principle connecting this evidence with the advice given to police officers would be A.

A - If A is true, then suspect lineups in which witnesses can hear one another identifying suspects would definitely facilitate the level of confidence witnesses have (whether hearing others confirm someone else diminishes their confidence or hearing others confirm who they think it was, raises their confidence)

B - This doesn't bridge the focus of the evidence (certain factors can increase or undermine a witness's confidence...) and conclusion (therefore police officers are advised to disallow suspect lineups...) and instead introduces a new, irrelevent concern about the connection between the accuracy of witness statements and the number of suspects a witness is confronted with at a time (which was never an issue...)

C - Doesn't seem connected to the ideas in the stimulus and brings up another issue of the likelihood that the suspect committed the crime as it is affected by multiple identifications (when all we are concerned about is each individual witness' confidence levels)

D - Total opposite - the stimulus says that confidences is not a reliable indicator of accuracy, so it wouldnt make sense why the cops would be more interested in confidence over accuracy.

E - Is not connected to this stimulus at all really...this stimulus is focused on the accuracy of an individual's identification

[skapur777]

While I didn't exactly see the overarching logic behind this argument (I still think this question is unfair!), I got the answer correct because of the following:

A- left as possible answer choice
B- police officers want to get rid of suspect lineups, says nothing of suspects themselves...
C- No...the confidence of the group doesn't necessarily give credibility to the person they picked..and if so wouldn't they WANT to have this then? Why get rid of something that can help them identify the perpetrator?
D- No, and I was torn between A and D here. I said no because it says "police officers are more interested in the confidence witnesses have when testifying...I did not assume that testifying and eyewitness identification were the same thing..in fact I believe them to be quite different. And thus, eliminated this answer. Besides, if they wanted to measure confidence, then they would want to see how their confidence changes with more ppl. Is this correct logic, especially concerning the testifying thing?
E- No for mainly the same reason as C.

[bigtree65]

The only reason I picked A is because it bridges the weird logical gap between "certain factors can increase or undermine witness's confidence..." and the conclusion. Other than that I find this argument to be very strange and don't understand why confidence is a relevant issue that police should care about. And saying that overconfidence is bad seems like were making to many assumptions in this argument. That's my two cents.

[eapetrilli]

The first sentence provides background, but ends up functioning as a red herring of sorts. We are only concerned with the core and the only support for the conclusion leaves an unexplained gap. We do not have to concern ourselves with explaining why the police officer would advocate for lessening undue influence on confidence, only why he makes the recommendation concerning suspect lineups. I think that this question is a prime example of the LSAT trying to dissuade you from selecting the right answer because it doesn't seem right (from the context of the distracting background.)

[austindyoung]

The first sentence provides background, but ends up functioning as a red herring of sorts. We are only concerned with the core and the only support for the conclusion leaves an unexplained gap.

This.

This is key to solving this problem.

Core is key, and the first sentence is background information that is is not part of the argument.

[WaltGrace1983]

Answer choices (C) and (E) specifically (though B does this too with the word "unless") give us a principle that relies on "if," a conditional.

(C) If X happens, it is more likely that Y happens.
(E) Accuracy is doubtful if X happens

(B) If ~X then accuracy cannot be trusted.

When thinking about these conditionals and thinking about the question, there is no way to prove anything about whether or not X does or doesn't happen. From this conclusion, couldn't I eliminate (C), (E), and (B) just because of that?

[deedubbew]

why is D wrong?

Hello there!

So, in part, I think you are totally right. There is not a ton of logic connecting the premises and the conclusion - but what that points to specifically is some big assumption you have to figure out for yourself to understand how this argument works!

I think you might want to broaden your understanding of the argument a little bit. Yes, the police of course want eyewitnesses to be as accurate as possible, but if something doesn't affect their accuracy there could still be other concerns here. Perhaps even if the eyewitness can't be made more accurate, we don't want to unduly increase their confidence from situational factors. I think that is what is going on here. It's one thing to have a problematic eyewitness, but he becomes that much more problematic as he becomes more confident without having reasons to increase his confidence. Does that make sense?

Once that makes sense, might you feel up to the challenge of posting your analysis of each of the answer choices on this board? That's a great test/learning opportunity

[dukeag]

Hello! First post here...

What I don't get is how (A) is a "principle' supporting the advice. I guess I'm used to more direct answers in principle questions in which the principle clearly justifies the reasoning used in the premise. I am also used to principles sounding like general rules by which people support their reasoning. (A) seems more like a supporting premise (connected to another missing premise, which we have to infer) rather than a general principle.

My reasoning for why (A) was right is because maybe the practice of allowing suspect lineups in which witnesses can hear one another identifying suspects was previously based on the assumption that there was a correlation between confidence and accuracy, but upon finding out that studies show no correlation between a witness' confidence and accuracy, they decided to disallow it because it did not increase witness' accuracy and was therefore a practice which wasted time and resources.

Am I on the right track?

[WaltGrace1983]

Hello! First post here...

What I don't get is how (A) is a "principle' supporting the advice. I guess I'm used to more direct answers in principle questions in which the principle clearly justifies the reasoning used in the premise. I am also used to principles sounding like general rules by which people support their reasoning. (A) seems more like a supporting premise (connected to another missing premise, which we have to infer) rather than a general principle.

You know, I tend to agree slightly. The way that the stimulus is worded and the way that the answer choice is worded is not the way in which a majority of principle questions go. Usually we can boil down principle questions to if-then statements (kind of like sufficient assumptions) and eliminate answers for contradicting or misinterpreting those if-then statements. Other times we have to think about the assumption the argument is making and plug it in, in the form of a principle (much like a strengthen or maybe even sometimes like a necessary assumption). However, while this principle question doesn't fit a cookie-cutter mold, I think it is just because this is a slightly more difficult question.

My reasoning for why (A) was right is because maybe the practice of allowing suspect lineups in which witnesses can hear one another identifying suspects was previously based on the assumption that there was a correlation between confidence and accuracy, but upon finding out that studies show no correlation between a witness' confidence and accuracy, they decided to disallow it because it did not increase witness' accuracy and was therefore a practice which wasted time and resources.

Am I on the right track?

The stimulus actually said there ISN'T much of a correlation between accuracy and confidence. So I'm unsure about the bolded and why this is relevant.

Also, wasted time and resources is going way off the mark. This was never mentioned at all. Here is what you should be concerned about:

Certain factors increase/undermine witness's confidence without altering accuracy
→
Police officers should disallow suspect lineups in which witnesses can hear others identifying suspects

Why would the author say this conclusion? Well let's analyze this argument. The author says that "yea, there are certain things that increase/undermine a witnesses confidence" SO THEREFORE "we shouldn't have witnesses be able to hear other witnesses." It seems that the conclusion is related to confidence: the author is saying this because the author doesn't want confidence to be bolstered/undermined unnecessarily. In other words, we want the most confident witnesses!

Think about the problem like this. The premises are used to support the conclusion. Yet the ideas in the premises are way off from the ideas in the conclusion - on the surface that is. What does this mean? There is an assumption happening, that's what! What is this assumption?

Well we see a slight shift in subject. We are talking about "certain factors" in the premises and in the conclusion we are talking about this idea of "disallowing suspect lineups in which witnesses can hear other identifying suspects." This problem means the author is assuming that such lineups bolster/undermine a witness's confidence! In other words, these types of subject lineups ARE the "certain factors" we talked about in the premises.

(A) This one seems good! If this is true, then the argument actually makes a lot of sense. Plug (A) in between the premises and the conclusion and see what happens

(B) This simply doesn't match up to what we are discussing. This says "~confronted with more than one → accuracy isn't trusted". However, are we concerned with the accuracy being trusted? Where in the stimulus does it show any concern about that?

(C) If several eyewitness all identify the same suspect in a lineup → ___________; I don't need to read any further. This simply doesn't match up. We actually haven't gotten to the identification phase of the process! We are only talking about setting up these subject lineups.

(D) This one is tricky! However, this is actually quite unsupported. You can see it in the premises: "without altering the accuracy of the identification." From this, we can infer that accuracy is actually quite important! In addition (and perhaps more importantly), it doesn't link up the premise and conclusion. In order to link these premises and conclusion about correctly with (D), we would have to make an additional assumption - that these particular types of subject lineups are linked to confidence.

(E) Eyewitnesses contradicts what other eyewitnesses have seen → ___________; like (C), I don't care about the rest. This is not matching up to the argument.

Hope that helps!

[ohthatpatrick]

Excellent explanation, Walt!

Just to circle back to a couple questions/comments ...

- This PRINCIPLE question is different from most ... in fact, the question stem itself is different from most.

The PRINCIPLE question stem we see most often is
"Which of the following principles, if valid, most justifies the argument?"

Even though this is worded like STRENGTHEN ("˜most justifies’), in practice it usually acts like SUFFICIENT ASSUMPTION.

The correct answer is normally an If-Then that simply says, "If what-the-Premise-talked-about applies to you, Then you deserve the judgment declared in the conclusion."

However, be wary "” even though the correct answers normally function like If-Then sufficient assumptions, they don’t need to. Stay flexible and remember that the correct answer might just strengthen.

THIS question stem, meanwhile, says
"Which of the following principles underlies the advice/reasoning?"
a similar stem is
"Which of the following principles most conforms to the reasoning?"

Essentially, question stems like this operate more like Necessary Assumption. But you probably don’t need to over-think it. You can still get by looking for an answer that connects the Premise to the Conclusion.

- And Walt, to your earlier question, you certainly could get rid of B, C, and E as soon as you saw that the Trigger in each conditional statement did not match up with anything.

Nice work!

[mkd000]

I like how WaltGrace eliminated B/C/E, but I don't think the way they eliminated D is the most effective. I eliminated D because we don't know what police officers are more interested in. What if they aren't interested in anything? What if they are simply following the instructions of the state's attorney/crown counsel?

Also, initially I saw the gap in the argument as: maybe confidence and accuracy of account are not highly correlated. BUT, it is possible that confidence may be correlated to other things. For example, what if accuracy of witness account is not impacted by confidence, but memory of instance is impacted?

Is my line of thought going in the right direction??

[ohthatpatrick]

I agree, there’s more than one way to get rid of (D). I’m not sure why we’d care what police are more interested in doing.

We’re only assessing the question of “Should they / shouldn’t they” let witnesses hear each other in a suspect lineup?

(D) would only be relevant to answering that question if we were going to base the should they / shouldn’t they on what POLICE are more interested in.

Let’s pretend for a second that we ARE basing our answer on what police are more interested in. If they’re more interested in confidence, SHOULD they allow witnesses to hear each other?

…. ?

I still don’t know how allowing witnesses to hear each other has any connection to confidence. (that’s why A provides something valuable)

Can we also just point out for a sec how CRAZY (D) sounds? LSAT is politically correct and conservative. You don’t see many correct answers flouting common sense.

Cops don’t care whether you’re accurately identifying a culprit, they just wanna hear you really SELL it? That’s nuts.

I got confused with your line of thinking, because “accuracy of account” and “memory of instance” sound like completely interchangeable ideas to me.

I would just suggest that on any Principle question you make sure that whatever answer choice you’re considering touches on both the Premise and the Conclusion (bridging the two).

(A) has premise language “confidence” and conclusion language “awareness of what others claim to have seen”.

(D)'s only nod to the conclusion is "police officers", but the conclusion is not about what police are interested in, it's about what we should advise police officers to do.

The fact that “police officers” are the first two words of the conclusion is really immaterial to the discussion taking place … we know we’re all concerned with justice … we want accurate identification of culprits … we’re basically debating the procedure by which we conduct lineups in order to maximize those goals.