Q25

[jennifer]

Which line in the passage indicates tha D is the correct Thank you. I am just not seeing it. Thank you

[noah]

The answer is actually (E) - and in case you mistyped, let me explain that one:

We're looking for what the author says about conformity in decision-making. It's hard to pre-phrase this, since there's lots of info about these topics. Let's work wrong to right.

(A) is unsupported and has an issue of degree. For us to disagree with this, (i.e. to say that the author does not agree with this) then we'd have to say that the author believes enforced conformity is NEVER appropriate. I imagine there's some situation for which the author would say "OK, in this case, it's OK to have enforced conformity." (Perhaps when folks are in mortal danger.)

(B) is tempting - we learn that groupthink is a recurring pattern in military decision-making that are related to major fiascoes; but can we say that this is true in general? Are all military decisions related to fiascoes? I hope not!

(C) is out of scope - there's no discussion of inadequate information.

(D) is out of scope - there's no discussion of the relative frequency of types of conformity!

(E) better be correct! There's support for this answer in lines 5-7.

[keonheecho]

Hi, I'm a little confused with this explanation. You mentioned that (B) is incorrect because a high degree of conformity is not necessarily expected in general, but the answer choice merely states that it is 'often expected'. Considering that 'often' is an ambiguous term, couldn't (B) still be correct? I get that (E) is a more correct answer, but this one stumped me.

I think I might have an idea of why (B) is wrong and I hope someone can let me know if I am right or not. So this particular answer choice is addressed in paragraph 4, which states that "Based on analyses of major fiascoes of international diplomacy AND military decision making, researchers identified groupthink behavior as a recurring pattern..." But this statement merely states it is an analysis and does not specify whether international diplomacy had instances of groupthink or military decision making did...couldn't it also be the case that the analysis found that groupthink/conformity only occurred within international diplomacy, and not military decision making? Is this reasoning correct?

[maryadkins]

I'd say the problematic term here is "fiascoes." They studied fiascos. That's where the problem happens; not in the general military or diplomatic populations, or even "often."

The groupthink was recurring pattern within the research on fiascoes—problem situations. When things went south. How can we take that and say, "Oh, then there must be a fair number of military people who we can expect to conform."

[Mab6q]

This question is tricky, because if it had asked for an AC that was most strongly supported, I would've easily chosen E and moved on. However I was looking for something that the author explicitly stated, and I just couldn't find matching text for E. My question is regarding inference questions that ask for something that was stated in the passage: shouldn't the answers to these questions match up almost verbatim with the text? I couldn't find psychological in the text.

[tommywallach]

Verbatim is the wrong way to think of it. The correct answer will simultaneously do two things:

1) Be something that the passage DID say at some point.

2) Be phrased in a way that uses NONE (or very few) of the exact words used in the passage.

In other words...it's all about synonyms!

-t

[andrewgong01]

The answer is actually (E) - and in case you mistyped, let me explain that one:

We're looking for what the author says about conformity in decision-making. It's hard to pre-phrase this, since there's lots of info about these topics. Let's work wrong to right.

(A) is unsupported and has an issue of degree. For us to disagree with this, (i.e. to say that the author does not agree with this) then we'd have to say that the author believes enforced conformity is NEVER appropriate. I imagine there's some situation for which the author would say "OK, in this case, it's OK to have enforced conformity." (Perhaps when folks are in mortal danger.)

(B) is tempting - we learn that groupthink is a recurring pattern in military decision-making that are related to major fiascoes; but can we say that this is true in general? Are all military decisions related to fiascoes? I hope not!

(C) is out of scope - there's no discussion of inadequate information.

(D) is out of scope - there's no discussion of the relative frequency of types of conformity!

(E) better be correct! There's support for this answer in lines 5-7.

I am still confused with your explanation for "A". Why are we trying to disagree with this? If the author does indeed say that it is okay for enforced conformity sometimes isn't that directly supporting what choice "A" says though and we don't need to negate the choice. I chose "A" because it seemed like from P1 the author did say that conformity can be good and this answer choice was weak as it said "may ...[be good under certain circumstances"