Q26

[jackie8848]

I don't see why (A) is the correct answer. I can't find anything in the passage that mentions the understanding of human cognition by the lawyers. The last sentence of the last paragraph seems relevant, but I don't see how it leads to the conclusion that lawyers have a less sophisticate understanding of human cognition than do psychologists.

Thanks.

[ohthatpatrick]

It definitely is a tough Inference question -- all of the answer at first seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.

One thing we always do with Inference questions is find the window of text that can serve as our proof.

Since this question stem wants us to generalize about 'lawyers', we should ask ourselves, "when did the passage ever talk about lawyers?"

There are only 2 mentions I saw, line 8 and the last sentence of the passage.

Line 8 just says that lawyers call jurors' inferential process "fact-finding". It doesn't seem to be helpful to support any of the answer choices.

Meanwhile, the last sentence says that most judges have a "limited and primitive" concept of jury inferential error:

limited - because they only know about traditional sources of potential error

primitive - because they believe what lawyers do about human cognition, rather than believing what psychologists do.

So you get a link here between "primitive" and "what notions lawyers have about human cognition", as well as a contrast between what lawyers believe and what psychologists believe.

That's how we'd support (A). If lawyers' understanding is "more primitive" than that of psychologists, we could also say it's "less sophisticated". Those are two sides of the same coin.

B) is wrong because the passage never suggests that the INTENT of complex evidence is to confuse.
C) is wrong because the passage gives us no way to compare lawyers vs. judges (if anything, the last sentence suggests they share the same sensibilities, making them equal)
D) is wrong because there's nothing in our two line references that says the lawyers have actively tried to help judges ... the last sentence says that judges use notions held by lawyers, but that doesn't mean the lawyers shared those notions with the judges in order to help them.
E) is tempting, but it's more of a stretch from the last sentence than (A) is. It's stated black-and-white, they are "unrealistic". We know the author favors the insights of psychologists over the notions of lawyers, but that's a comparative idea. This answer is just an absolute statement.

Tough question. Let me know if you remain unconvinced that (A) is the most supportable from the window of proof we have concerning 'lawyers'.

[wguwguwgu]

A follow-up question here:
Is it just me or the last sentence (on which Q26 is based) is phrased ambiguously and can be understood in another way:

I guess the intended reading is:
it ignores ...... in favor of .....
thus, the notions held by lawyers are in direct contrast to the research of psychologists and are more primitive/inferior

But can't it also be read in this way:
it ignores the research and conclusion (which is) in favor of notions held by lawyer
this way, the phrase "in favor of notions...." is an adjective for "research and conclusion" and indicates that the lawyers are verified by the new research
thus, answer D would be the closest one?



Many thanks in advance!

[ohthatpatrick]

You're definitely on to some grammatical ambiguity there. I'm trying my darndest to think of a good grammatical reason why we have to interpret it LSAT's way vs. your alternative.

But I can't come up with anything. It definitely seems like you can add "in favor" as another prepositional modifier of "research and conclusions".

Had they used a different verb than "ignore", we might be forced to expect a 2nd half to that thought.
(For example, "prefer X to Y" would always have a two part structure, as would "favor X over Y".)

However, it's totally possible to just say "ignore X".

Saying "ignore X in favor of Y" isn't super common to my ears, but it's definitely legit.

If a writer wanted to clearly indicate your alternative interpretation of that sentence, she would remove that ambiguity by saying "research and conclusions of psychologists WHO favor the notions of lawyers"

Nevertheless, your interpretation wouldn't support (D). Even if the psychologists were taking the advice of lawyers, the lawyers could not be helping judges to minimize jury inferential error since we are told that the judges ignore the psychologists (and thus, by proxy, ignore the lawyers).

Good times.