LR Question 24 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Studies have found that human tears contain many of…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: Crying reduces emotional stress.
REASONING: Stress produces hormones. Crying removes those hormones.
ANALYSIS: This is a causation-correlation error. Stress produces hormones. That doesn’t mean hormones cause stress.
Hormones may just be a side effect. In that case, removing them would be useless.
___________
- A nonsense answer. The argument didn’t prove that crying reduces emotional stress, so it’s useless to argue about how it reduces stress.
- This describes a sufficient-necessary error. That’s a different error. (We don’t know that the hormones are required for stress by the way. It’s possible stress still occurs even if hormones are artificially blocked)
- This answer says that two things might both influence each other. That’s a valid point in general, but it doesn’t apply to this argument. There’s no two-way influence that we know of.
- A different error. All the elements are clearly separated in this stimulus.
- CORRECT. The argument assumes that hormones cause stress, because the body produces them when we are stressed. But it could be that they’re just a byproduct, and removing them has no effect.
More Resources for Flaw Questions
- Flaw drills: Use these to practice making examples of abstract flaws.
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Flaw questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers flaw questions.
Hi,
Could you go over more why C is wrong? I had a lot of trouble with this one because C and E seemed equally correct. When I first read the question my take on what was wrong was that we don’t know where the hormones in tears are coming from–it seems really likely from the paragraph that the stress of crying causes the hormones in the first place, and if crying causes the hormones to form then getting rid of them would just be neutral. But the conclusion ignores this. I kind of took this to be what C is saying; is that not right? Thanks so much for this site!
Even if it were the case that the stress of crying is what triggers the hormone production, and the hormones are in turn removed by the tears, (C) describes a different flaw than the one in the argument. Here’s the breakdown of (C), and note how it differs from your initial characterization:
(the argument overlooks the possibility that …)
“even if one phenomenon causally contributes to a second phenomenon” –> even if crying triggers hormone production
“the second phenomenon may causally influence the first” –> hormone production may actually casually influence crying
As an aside, breaking down the answer choice into its components parts as I’ve done above is one of the best ways to simplify convoluted answer choices in Flawed Reasoning questions.
Yes that makes sense, thanks!