by littlebibliophile Sat Sep 03, 2011 7:23 pm
The key information in this stimulus is that students "vastly overestimated" how many people thought they were lying, that volleyball players' teammates noticed their lackluster performance far less often than the players expect, and that a small fraction of people notice a student's funny shirt, contrary to his expectations.
So what we should pick up on while reading is that the test writers were very careful to make it clear that each person in these scenarios had expectations about something being noticed. In all of the examples, the actual result was far less than the expected result.
(A) is the opposite of what the stimulus suggests. It seems that people are far more aware of themselves than other people are of them.
(B) to me was a tempting choice. It says that people tend not to notice the appearance or behavior of others. I deferred judgment on this choice, but it is incorrect because it speaks in such generalities. We know that people noticed things less than the subject expected, but does that translate to people tending not to notice the appearance or behavior of others period? I think this choice just goes a bit too far with this sweeping statement.
(C) This choice flips the expectations from the person observed, to the expectations of the observer. We haven't gotten any info about what the people doing the observing thought or expected.
(D) is totally unwarranted because it says that for something to be noticed, it must be highlighted in some way. We don't know if anything was "highlighted" in these scenarios.
(E) is correct because it says that people tend to believe their appearance/behavior are noticed by others more often than they actually are. Here we have the subject expecting a certain amount of attention, and the actual amount of attention is lower than their estimation. This is just like all three examples given in the stim.