Q18 - Columnist: The advent of television

[zhanga]

Can someone help explain this question please?

[giladedelman]

Sure! This is a pretty tricky question, mainly because of the answer choices, I think.

The argument itself, and its flaw, are pretty straightforward. The premise introduces a correlation: urban areas got television earlier than rural areas, and they also experienced an increase in homicide about the same amount of time earlier. From this, the argument concludes that the advent of television explains, i.e., caused, the increase in homicide rates.

So this is one of the LSAT's most common flaws: inferring a causal connection from a mere correlation. To strengthen the argument, we're probably going to have to bolster this causal connection somehow.

(B) is correct because it pretty explicitly lends credence to the causal idea. If the portrayal of violence on TV is a cause of violence in society, then maybe the columnist is right that the earlier advent of TV in urban areas contributed to the higher murder rate. (This would work even if it said that the portrayal of cooking, or basketball, or whatever on TV caused violent behavior in real life; the point is that TV is causing violence.)

(A) is kind of tempting until we consider that it does nothing to establish a causal connection between TV and homicides. It just gives us some more correlation information.

(C) would weaken the argument, if anything, by undermining one possible explanation of the link between TV and real-world violence. But you could also say it's out of scope because the argument itself doesn't make any claims about violence on TV.

(D) is out of scope because the argument isn't about an individual's exposure to violence or the degree of its effect.

(E) might be tempting, too, but we actually have no idea whether the rise of TV involved an increase in leisure time. Maybe people actually had less leisure time in this era.

Does that clear this one up for you?

[zhanga]

Thanks for the explanation!

But I still have a problem with the correct answer.

I ended up choosing E and I see how it's problematic because we don't know if more television sets led to more leisure time.

Yet, with answer choice B, how are we suppose to know if more television sets meant more violence being shown on t.v.? Even if violence on t.v. is the cause for violence in society, it seems to me that we'd have to assume that violence was shown on t.v.

I guess my problem is that both B and E requires an implicit assumption for it to be the right answer, so why is B more preferable to E?

[giladedelman]

Ah, yes, I should have been more clear about this, because I definitely got hung up on the same issue when I first did the problem.

Here's the thing. Answer (B) doesn't just say, "If there were violence on TV, then it would cause violence in real life." It says that "the portrayal of violence on television IS a cause ... of the violence in society." So if answer (B) is true, then violence on TV is a phenomenon, and it does cause violence in the real world. So this answer is telling us explicitly that there is a way for TV to cause violence -- which is what we need to strengthen the argument.

(E), on the other hand, doesn't tell us that TV can cause violence. We would have to add in an entire extra assumption about leisure time and TV in order to make that connection.

Now, you're right that the argument doesn't specify whether these early days of television included violent programming. Maybe there was none! We don't know. So answer (B) does not make this a perfect argument. But our job is to pick the answer that most supports the argument, and answer (B), by establishing concretely that television does at least sometimes causally contribute to violence, gives the most support.

Does that answer your question?

[yama_sekander]

I would like to run my opinion on why A is wrong. the argument is dealing with a correlation between television sets and an increase in homicide/violence.


but A makes a causal connection between number of violent television PROGRAMS.

therefore, it does not touch upon the correlation present in the argument.

[anjelica.grace]

The difficulty I had with eliminating (A) was that it appeared to strengthen the causation by showing less cause, less effect.

I see now that it merely is another evidence of correlation, but not causation.

However, one technique to strengthening a causal argument is showing either cause with the effect or no cause, no effect. How is the "no cause, no effect" strengthener different from an irrelevant correlation answer choice like (A)?

[theanswer21324]

If this problem had not included (B), would (A) have been correct? I ended up picking (A) because I applied the Manhattan causation of strategy of showing that when there is no cause, there is no effect. Is (A) wrong simply because (B) is a better answer, or is (A) wrong because it does not serve as an adequate basis to strengthen the argument at all? I was hoping so that I could use this as a reference for future problems.

Thanks for your help

[maryadkins]

If this problem had not included (B), would (A) have been correct?

Yes! Great question, and you're right; (A) is not correct because (B) is clearly better. It's always better to explicitly establish causation than it is merely to boost the correlation give. But if the only answer that has anything to do with the question is one that boosts the correlation--this is, if the other 4 are clearly irrelevant or the opposite of what you want--then that can be a correct answer on a strengthen question.

[WaltGrace1983]

I had problems eliminating (D) so I am going to run through my explanation here.

TV became popular 5 years earlier in urban households
+
Urban homicide began increasing about 4 years earlier than the similar increase in rural
→
The arrival of television caused the earlier growth in homicide rates among urban communities (vs. the later growth rates among rural communities)

This is typical. Correlation/causation issues are best solved by doing a few things:

(1) Show that same cause produced the same effect in an analogous situation
(2) Show that the absence of the cause produced the absence of the effect
(3) Show that the effect didn't actually cause the cause
(4) Rule out an alternate explanation

With this in mind, we can go to the answer choices knowing that one of these 4 options is probably going to pop up.

(A) We have no idea about where the number of violent television programs are low. Maybe urban communities have very little violent television programs (remember that we are talking about an INCREASE not exactly an absolute NUMBER of homicides).

(B) This shows us option #3 of the strengthening a causation claim. It says that violence on TV caused violence in society. Thus, (violence on TV → violence in society). This really helps us to strengthen the correlation/causation issue because it shows that TV → violence rather than violence → TV.

(C) We don't know when the "early years" of television were, first of all. We may presume that the advent of television coincide with the advent of television in urban communities. Yet even if we assume this, this actually weakens the causal claim just a bit by showing that there weren't even any violent television programs in those years! If there were no violent television programs, we may conclude (though its definitely not necessary) that TV didn't cause violence. In other words, this actually destabilizes our causal conclusion if even just a little bit.

(D) This is the one I had problems with. Looking back though, I simply forgot my task. The argument is NOT saying that there was a bigger increase in urban homicide or that there were more urban homicides after television. The argument IS saying that TV helps to explain why urban homicide rates began increasing EARLIER than. Both urban and rural had about the same increase. Thus, we are not talking about how "profound" the effect was. We are talking about how early/late the effect was. We want to know about temporal aspects, not the magnitude of TV's effect.

However, I think this would be a correct answer if it said "The earlier that a person is exposed to violence on television, the earlier the effect that said violence has on that person." Let me know if you agree/disagree with this.

(E) What is the connection between leisure time and television-watching? We don't know!

This question very rigidly goes along with the basic way to strengthen a correlation/causation issue. The problem is that the answer choices are very intricate and attention to detail is crucial.

[LsatCrusher822]

Can we also reason that A is incorrect because of the word "programs"? The way I justified crossing this out was to think that even if the number of violent tv programs are low, one or two really popular violent programs maybe viewed by most if not all ppl. Hence the correlation may not be as strong as one might suspect.