June 2017 LSAT Section 1 Question 14
It can most reasonably be inferred that the choice of children as the subjects of the psychology experiments discusse...
Replies
Ryan on November 5, 2018
Please reply
Grace on November 18, 2018
I was also wondering why the answer choice was not E and why it's D!
Jacob on November 18, 2018
Hi @EleazarThere are two chunks of answer D that we are trying to infer from the passage: 1. Mental processes are sometimes easier to study in children and 2. Children are more likely than adults to make certain cognitive errors.
Starting with that latter piece, take a look at lines 7-13. We learn that children “tend to misdescribe their own thoughts†and that children “have the same thoughts that adults have . . . but are much less capable of identifying these thoughts.†These sound like cognitive errors that children are more likely to make than adults! So we have our first inference.
Now, why is the mental process easier to study in children? Because children, unlike adults, misdescribe their own thoughts, and thus the psychologists are able to make a broader inference about one’s awareness of one’s own thoughts being “every bit as inferential as one’s awareness of another person’s thoughts†and that “thoughts are unobservable entities that, among other things, help to explain why we act as we do.†(Lines 15-19)
So we have our inference about the mental process! I hope that helps.