Q6 - Studies show that individuals with

[tamwaiman]

I'm not sure but if two things change with the same degree (tend to/ the more..., the more...), they do not necessarily have causal relationship. Does this principle apply to the whole LSAT?
Thanks.

[giladedelman]

Good question!

When we see something like "X tends to be Y," we absolutely cannot infer a causal relationship. All it means is that the two things are correlated. Maybe X causes Y, maybe Y causes X, or maybe something else causes them both -- we don't know!

I think the same thing is true with "the more X, the more Y," but I'm not 100% sure -- I'm going to invite some of my colleagues to weigh in. On this particular question, it doesn't matter, because the conclusion depends in part on assuming a causal connection between desire to fit in and ethical behavior, on the one hand, and ethical behavior and lower risk-taking, on the other hand -- both of which pairs are only connected by "tend to." So before we even get to the "the more this, the more that" phase, the argument has invalidly assumed two causal connections.

Great question! More explanation to come.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

I'm not sure but if two things change with the same degree (tend to/ the more..., the more...), they do not necessarily have causal relationship. Does this principle apply to the whole LSAT?

Correct. "The more of one thing, the more of another" does not imply a causal relationship. And that does hold for the entire LSAT, and logic in general outside of the LSAT. Those are strict correlations since they discuss the frequency of the co-occurrence of two events.

Notice the evidence consists of three parts:

1. high propensity for risks, have fewer ethical principles.
2. strong desire for social acceptance, have more ethical principles.
3. more ethical principles, more ethical behavior.

This would allow for a weak correlation between high propensity for risks and less ethical behavior and between a desire for social acceptance and more ethical behavior.

But the argument's conclusion introduce's causation with word "promote." Maybe it is the ethical principles that cause the ethical behavior, or maybe it is something else that causes people to have both ethical principles and ethical behavior.

So the argument's flaw is that it mistakes a correlation for causal relationship - best expressed in answer choice (C).

(A) is not true. The conclusion never claims that one will always behave ethically if one has ethical principles.
(B) is not true. The importance of promoting ethical behavior is never discussed. The argument just suggests that it is possible.
(D) does not occur. Where are the words "believe" or "think" that would typically introduce matters of opinion?
(E) may be tempting if one mistakes the evidence for a causal connection or the conclusion for a causal connection. It is for this very reason we need to not diagram causation with using conditional logic, because then arguments that mistake correlation for causation suddenly appear as circular reasoning - as this answer suggests.

Hope that helps, but let me know if you still have a question on this one!

[mchelle]

Thanks for this very helpful post!

I was wondering what are some other commonly used terms on the LSAT for causation vs correlation. One problem I had with this question was that I wasn't able to identify "promote" as causation right away, so I ended up wasting some time in trying to decide if it really meant causation.

[tommywallach]

Hey Mchelle,

There are too many ways to say it to hope to memorize them. You have to be logical. If something definitively causes something to happen (to any degree), then it's causation! : )

-t