LR Question 9 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Anyone believing that no individual can have an effect…
QUESTION TYPE: Principle
CONCLUSION: If you want to improve society, then you shouldn’t believe that individuals can’t affect it.
REASONING: If you don’t think individuals can affect society, you will feel too helpless to change it.
ANALYSIS: On LSAT principle-justify questions, you must first of all figure out what the argument is saying. Let’s look at the logic. It boils down to this:
“If you think individuals are powerless, then you’ll turn into a helpless loser and you won’t accomplish anything. Therefore you shouldn’t believe that individuals are powerless.”
Notice the word “should” in the conclusion. On the LSAT, you can never prove that something “should” happen unless you have a premise that says what you “should” do. So we need a “should” statement that links the premise and the conclusion. Like this:
“If something makes you a helpless loser, then you shouldn’t believe it.”
___________
- This doesn’t match the conclusion, which was about what you should believe.
- We’re trying to prove that individuals should reject the belief that historical forces determine the future. This answer tells us what people should do if they reject this belief.
So this refers to the wrong term. This is an extremely common technique for tricky answers. - Like answer B, this refers to the wrong thing. This answer talks about what you should do if you already feel helpless. We must prove that you should avoid beliefs that make you feel helpless.
- CORRECT. If this is true, then you shouldn’t accept the belief that society is determined by vast historical forces. We know that would make you feel too helpless to improve society.
- Rubbish. The stimulus was about what we should believe, not how we should act.
Recap: The question begins with “Anyone believing that no individual can have”. It is a Principle question. To practice more Principle questions, have a look at the LSAT Questions by Type page.
More Resources for Principle Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Principle questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers principle questions.
No idea if this is checked anymore but wanted to put my thoughts in writing for practice. Curious if this checks out.
For me, a shortcut that helped was seeing that in answers A, B and C, it is talking about what certain groups of people SHOULD do. But the argument isn’t making claims about anyone should do *except* “anyone who wants to improve society”.
We can therefore eliminate A, B and C right away because their function is to establish “should’s” for groups of people outside the scope of the argument. For example, the stimulus argument doesn’t make any claim about what “anyone who believes that individuals can have an effect on society’s future” *should* do. Therefore A can be eliminated. Similarly for B and C.
E is just totally of the mark, and that leaves D. Which seems strong, but is the only one that fits.
That’s a good way to think! Another similar method for other questions you may come across is that the stimulus tells you what someone should do and the answers refer to what you shouldn’t do. Or the stimulus tells you to believe something and the answer tells you to act on something. Or the stimulus is talking about people who do X and the answer is talking about people who don’t do X. Differences like that are a good way to rule out answers (obviously depending on the context) :)
This stimulus was very difficult to understand and I couldn’t come up with any prephrase. I was able to eliminate A and E because they both state to “act” but among the rest of answer choices, I got even more confused and ended up guessing after wasting time comparing them. I also employed a technique of finding a necessary assumption by connecting new terms in the conclusion and the premise hoping it would help but didn’t succeed. Ultimately I ended wasting a lot of time and getting this question wrong. What do you suggest when this happens?
Sometimes you just don’t get a prephrase. I certainly don’t always get one. The key on necessary is noticing where they swap terms. Here we have two similar sounding but different terms:
* Feeling too helpless to act
* Accepting one belief that makes you feel helpless
They sound similar. But, does having a *single* negative belief make you helpless? D gets to the core of that.
But this is easy to show in hindsight and hard to get in timed conditions. If you’re stuck on a question, you’ve checked the answers and checked the stimulus again – flag it and move on. Come back later to give it a second shot if you have time. Sometimes things are clearer the second time around. And it is precisely by skipping that we have time to finish and come back.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
Hey Graeme, thanks for these explanations, they are very helpful. Is this the type of question where you should have an idea of the answer before going into the answer choices? When I did this question, I couldn’t quite put the “flaw” into words but when I read the answer choices, D jumped out at me as the right answer.
I prephrased it. But I think prephrasing is individual. You want to increase the percent of questions you prephrase, but not worry about whether or not you can prephrase a single questions.
The better your intuition, the more questions you’ll be able to prephrase. Also, on principle/justify questions you can prephase by seeing what the conclusion says and then seeing what the gap is between that and the evidence.