A child's conception of whether certain behavior is right or wrong, referred to as "behavioral pre-disposition," is fully developed by the age of 10. During a person's teenage years, other teenagers with whom the person associates regularly have a significant influence on whether the person later acts in accordance with his or her predisposition. In other words, teenagers tend to mimic their peers' behavior. It is interesting to note that the vast majority of adult criminals also committed crimes as teenagers and associated primarily with other teenagers who later became adult criminals.
Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn from the information above?
[A] A child's conception of whether certain behavior is right or wrong can change during the child's teenage years.
[B] Until a child becomes a teenager it is impossible to predict whether the child will eventually become an adult criminal.
[C] Law-abiding adults are unlikely to have developed a predisposition for adult criminal behavior.
[D] An adult criminal is likely to have been predisposed as a child to criminal behavior.
[E] Pre-teen children who are not predisposed to criminal behavior are unlikely to become adult criminals.
Am I wrong or is the OA wrong? Please help.
[Source: Peterson's, Master the GMAT 2013]
Official answer is D. The official explanation is as follows:
Based on the last sentence of the passage, we can conclude that juvenile criminals associate primarily with other juvenile criminals, and that adult criminals constitute the same group of people who were juvenile criminals. For choice (D) to not be readily inferable would require most adult criminals associate primarily with law-abiding peers as teenagers. But this contradicts what we know about adult criminals, based on the passage information. Thus, choice (D) is strongly inferable.
I find some of the reasoning here flawed. Juvenile criminals do associate with other juvenile criminals, BUT juvenile criminals might have had acted for or against their pre-teen conception of right and wrong. But (D) claims that they were predisposed. Or, to flip it around (as the OA does): for choice (D) to not be readily inferable would require adult criminals associate primarily with teenagers who had the correct conception of what constitutes a bad behavior (i.e. they knew that stealing was bad). That doesn't contradict anything, because no information is available on how other juvenile criminals were predisposed.
In other words, a child who knows that stealing is bad might be influenced to steal, become a juvenile criminal and influence another "good boy" to steal.
I think the only possible answer here is (B).