LSAT Question Explanation
PT 103, Section 1, Question 6
Identify the FlawArgument structure
Owning VCRs causes people to go to the movie theater.
VCR owners go to the movies more frequently than non-VCR owners.
Explanation
There is a correlation between VCR ownership and frequently going to the movies in the evidence, but we can't conclude a causal relationship based on a correlation!
Concluding that owning a VCR causes people to go to the movie theater really just seems counterintuitive. If you have a device that allows you to watch movies at home, why would that make you more likely frequent the movie theater?
The likely explanation in my opinion is that people who own VCR's and who go to the theater often are movie buffs. The VCR isn't causing them to go to the movie theater, there's a separate cause (being a movie lover) that leads to both VCR ownership and frequent theater visits. Or maybe they're just richer and can afford VCR's and lots of movie tickets. The point is, we don't know based on a mere correlation.
Answer choices
There is no conclusion that a claim is false in the stimulus. The conclusion is just that VCR ownership causes people to go to the movie theater often, based on the correlation in the evidence.
The evidence is the correlation between VCR ownership and frequenting the movies, which isn't inconsistent with any of the other information in the stimulus. It seems a bit odd when considered alongside the first sentence, but they can both be true at the same time. The explanation is probably just that people who like movies are more likely to own VCRs and go to the movies frequently.
The stimulus concludes a causal relationship from a correlation. It doesn't eliminate that there could be some other cause leading to the correlation between VCR ownership and frequenting the movie theater.
This answer choice indicates a sufficient/necessary condition swap, which didn't happen here. The conclusion doesn't rely on conditional logic, the problem in the stimulus was claiming causation based on a correlation.
There's no generalization from a small sample flaw here. There's no reason to think that the data on which the evidence is based was taken from a small sample size, it seems to be about the whole population.