Q5 - A person with low self-esteem

[Laura Damone]

Question Type:
Must Be True: Fill in the Blank

Stimulus Breakdown:
No argument here yet, so we just need the facts. 1. Folks with low self-esteem are disrespected more often than folks with high self-esteem. 2. In an experiment where people were treated the same, the folks with low self-esteem were more likely than the folks with high self-esteem to feel that they'd been disrespected.

Answer Anticipation:
Fill in the Blank Inference Family questions almost always connect all the facts in the stimulus to get to their conclusion. How do facts 1 and 2 connect? This one is hard to predict! There's no conditional logic here to link up. The facts express a correlation, so we don't want our conclusion to be causal (and we can predict that some trap answers probably will be causal). The stimulus is comparative so the right answer will probably deal with the comparison between those with low vs. high self-esteem. The stimulus also deals with amounts, so we should predict that quantity will factor in the correct answer in some way.

Correct answer:
D

Answer choice analysis:
(A) The difference between thinking you've been dissed and actually being dissed is something that will likely come to mind when reading this stimulus, and that makes A tempting. But remember, Fill in the Blank Inference questions are a flavor of Must Be True questions, not Most Strongly Supported. So ask yourself "does A absolutely have to be true?" No, it doesn't. If the low self-esteem folks think they've been dissed a lot more often than their high self-esteem friends when submitted to the same treatment, we know someone's got to be wrong. Maybe the high self-esteem group fails to recognize when they're being dissed, but it's also possible that the low self-esteem group feels like they're being dissed even when they're not.

(B) No way! Our facts are about correlation, and correlation doesn’t prove causation.

(C) No again! We can't infer a cause for our correlated phenomena.

(D) If the low self-esteem group is more often disrespected, and they are also more likely to feel disrespected when subjected to the same treatment, we can reasonably infer that they more often feel disrespected in general than their high self-esteem peers. Now, some folks might look at D and think that it's drawn from fact 2 alone. But we actually need fact 1 to make the leap from "more likely to feel disrespected" to "more often feel disrespected."

(E) Our comparison is just about how folks are treated and their perceptions of that treatment. It's not about how the folks treat anyone else, so this one is out of scope.

Takeaway/Pattern:
Fill in the Blank Inference questions are Must Be True questions that will connect all the dots in the stimulus. Even if you can't predict the exact connection, you can predict what the right answer will do, what some wrong answers will probably do, and work wrong to right, eliminating any answers that are close but not definitely true and answers that are out of scope.

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