Logical reasoning PrepTest 142 · Section 4 · Question 9

Incorrect. While this might explain why people rarely pay attention to statistical information, it does nothing to resolve the paradox of people ending up with accurate beliefs despite relying on unrepresentative anecdotes.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Paradox

Stimulus Summary:
People listen to anecdotes but ignore statistics. But even though anecdotes are misleading and unrepresentative, people tend to have accurate beliefs.

Answer Anticipation:
The interesting part of this stimulus is what it says about statistics—what would provide the hard data for accurate beliefs. It's not just that people prioritize anecdotes over statistical information—it's that they "rarely even pay attention" to statistical information.

If people are listening to misleading anecdotes about unrepresentative cases and ignoring statistical information that would reflect reality, how are they ending up with fairly accurate beliefs? If their beliefs were based on those anecdotes, they wouldn't be accurate, so they must be discounting that information somehow and forming their beliefs without relying on them as a baseline. It's hard to anticipate anything specific here, but anything that establishes people listen to anecdotes but don't form beliefs based on them will resolve this paradox.

Answer Explanation:
This answer matches our anticipation—it provides a reason to believe that, while listening to anecdotes, people don't use them to form beliefs about society since they know the cases in them to be unrepresentative. And while it doesn't perfectly explain how they form accurate beliefs, it does hint at a suggestion—if you know an anecdote to be unrepresentative, you can form a general idea of what the representative case would be. For instance, if you hear an anecdote about a lottery winner who donated all their money to charity and you believe it to be unrepresentative, you'd end up with the correct belief that most lottery winners aren't as charitable.


Key Takeaway:Paradox questions more than any other question on the test are about finding an answer that lets you tell a story instead of finding something that is 100% logical and airtight. These questions allow you to make some small jumps in applying the answer to the stimulus. Be a bit more flexible here than on other question types. At the same time, don't be too flexible and read all answers—only one is correct!

Incorrect. If anything, this answer provides a means by which anecdotes would define people's beliefs, making the paradox worse.

Incorrect. It would still be true that statistical information is rarely paid attention to, and anecdotes are generally misleading. Even if statistics could be made more interesting with anecdotes, that doesn't appear to be happening, and so it can't explain a widespread trend towards accurate beliefs.

Incorrect. In order to resolve the paradox, it would need to be established that the emotional response isn't driven by anecdotes and is generally accurate. Since this answer does neither, it doesn't resolve the paradox.