A researcher studying drug addicts found that, on average, they tend

(A) After becoming addicted to drugs, drug addicts learn to manipulate other people as a way of obtaining drugs.

If addicts learn to become manipulative after becoming one, then the researchers assertion that the people who are manipulative become addicts falls apart. The causal relationship is no longer evident.

Yes, the answer is 100% A

This argument is the typical correlation causation problem we see with many CR questions. Researchers have found a high incidence of those who manipulate others within drug addicts. They conclude that it is the manipulation that leads people to become drug addicts.

To weaken the argument, we can:

1) Remove the manipulation and show that people are still drug addicts

2) Give an alternate cause for drug addiction, or

3) Show that drug addiction leads to manipulation

The only answer choice that clearly does any of the above, is A.

Choice D, as many people who posted above me said, does not specifically attack the argument. It is a very weak attempt at weakening the argument...

A researcher studying drug addicts found that, on average, they tend to manipulate other people a great deal more than nonaddicts do. The researcher concluded that people who frequently manipulate other people are likely to become addicts.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the researcher’s conclusion?


(A) After becoming addicted to drugs, drug addicts learn to manipulate other people as a way of obtaining drugs. Drug addicts learn to manipulate other people after becoming addicted to drugs. This weakens the the argument. Correct
(B) When they are imprisoned, drug addicts often use their ability to manipulate other people to obtain better living conditions. Irrevelent
(C) Some nonaddicts manipulate other people more than some addicts do. The stimulus is talking about the entire group not some people from the group, Incorrecr
(D) People who are likely to become addicts exhibit unusual behavior patterns other than frequent manipulation of other people. Incorrect, Does not weaken the argument.
(E) The addicts that the researcher studied were often unsuccessful in obtaining what they wanted when they manipulated other people. Incorrect, Does not weaken the argument

I am confused between A & D here. I can clearly see that A is correct and thats what I have marked. But, I have no idea how D isnt the right answer.

The confusion, in my opinion, lies in the meaning of the word "Other than". If we take other than to mean, apart from or in addition to, D can easily be eliminated.
The another meaning of "Other than" can be except. In that case, The sentence is trying to convey that there are other indicators and not the one author is talking about. So it weakens author's conclusion by saying that the said indicator is not relavant.

Can experts please clarify? egmat mikemcgarry GMATNinja

GMATNinja

When we say A causes B, we make an assumption that A is the only cause of B. Now Option D is saying, other than A, X also causes B. In a way, it is breaking down an assumption that A is the only cause of B. Ideally, this should be a weakener then. Where am I going wrong? Please explain.

If I say that high unemployment causes low GDP growth, that does not mean that there are not other causes (lack of innovation, government policies, pandemics, etc.) of low GDP growth. In other words, to claim one thing causes another does not assume the former is the ONLY cause of the latter. There can be multiple causes (frequent manipulation, nose picking, etc.) of a single result (addiction).

Still, the other error in your logic is that the researcher DOES NOT conclude that frequently manipulating others CAUSES one to become an addict. Instead, he/she simply concludes that those who frequently manipulate are likely to become addicts. That indicates these two things are CORRELATED, but not necessarily that frequent manipulation CAUSES addiction.

For those reasons, in addition to what we’ve laid out in our previous post, we can eliminate (D).

I hope that helps!

drug addicts ----> tend to manipulate more than nonaddicts do

people who frequently manipulate ----> likely to become addicts

This is Cause and Effect relationship

Cause ---> manipulation

Effect ---> becoming addict

So, M ---> A

Answer choice A correctly says, A ---> M. In other words, it reverses the action, saying the cause is A, not M.

Let's analyse argument
Premise- drug addicts manipulate people more than non addicts.
Conclusion people who manipulate others might or are likely to become addicts


The question wants us to weaken the conclusion

A. A it says people manipulate others after getting addicted to drugs. This weakens the conclusion because it shows an effect(MANIPULATION) after the action(ADDITION) is performed.


B. This option says why drug addicts do manipulations. It does not address the conclusion that people who manipulates are likely to become addicts.

C. This option compares non addicts to addicts. Irrelevant

D. this option states that people have other behaviour patterns as well. in other words this people manipulate plus display other behavioral patterns.

E. This option tells us that their manipulations are not successful this option is irrelevant because it does not address the conclusion to weaken it.

AjiteshArun GMATNinja VeritasKarishma

My doubt is w.r.t to the Main conclusion of researchers: " The researcher concluded that people who frequently manipulate other people are likely to become addicts."

Question stem asks to weaken researchers conclusion.


So, as per my understanding , conclusion is not about any causality.it just says people who frequently manipulate are likely to become drug addicts.

weakening would be: Some people who frequently manipulate are not likely to become drug addicts..- No answer choice mentions such scenario.

Further,correct option A would have been correct, had conclusion be about causality i.e " manipulation caused people to become drug addicts". in that it says First people were addicts & then they learned to manipulate.

i am facing issues in approaching correlation questions. Please help on this one as to where i am faltering & also how to approach for correlation questions.

Hi gmatassassin88,

Here's the argument:
1. DAs tend to be more manipulative than non-DAs. ← This is the support.
2. Therefore, manipulative people are more likely to become DAs. ← This is the conclusion.

We can't get from (1) to (2) very easily. The author makes an assumption here, that "manipulative behavior" (M) does not start after "becoming an addict" (A). Now, weakening an assumption is a very common way to weaken an argument, so something like "M does start after A" would weaken the argument. That is, if the manipulative behavior develops only after the addiction, then clearly the author's conclusion that the manipulative behavior was in place before the addiction is severely weakened.

AjiteshArun I think argument says DA tend to manipulate other people contrary to what you mentioned that DA themselves becoming manipulative.

Though i understood the point you are trying to establish, please find my understanding below accordingly

first->People tend to manipulate other people. Secondly (then) People are likely to become DA.

assumption here is : people already knew to how to manipulate & then they become DA.option A weakens the same by saying people are already DA & then they learn to manipulate.

Consider this:
Tall people are likely to do better at sports.

What are you saying here? That their height helps them in some way to be better at sports, right? There is an implied causality.

The research found that drug addiction and manipulating people are linked.

Conclusion: People who frequently manipulate other people are likely to become addicts.
(The conclusion says that people who manipulate others become addicts so the manipulation is the cause of addiction).

But what if addiction is the one causing manipulations? If a person becomes addicted, he manipulates others to fulfil his addiction needs (money for drugs etc). This will weaken the conclusion that manipulative people are likely to become addicts.

Hence (A) is correct.

A researcher studying drug addicts found that, on average, they tend to manipulate other people a great deal more than nonaddicts do. The researcher concluded that people who frequently manipulate other people are likely to become addicts.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the researcher’s conclusion?


I'm posting an explanation because I struggled with options A, C and D, and while GMATNinja has pointed out the flaw in Option D, I wanted to confirm my learning from option A and C too

Gaps:
1) Manipulating more is not the same thing is manipulating more frequently
2) There seems to be a correlation between addiction and manipulation. It could be that addiction leads to manipulation and not the other way round


(A) After becoming addicted to drugs, drug addicts learn to manipulate other people as a way of obtaining drugs.
Initially, I rejected this option thinking that it doesn't tell me what addicts do before becoming addicted - maybe these non-addicts are manipulative for different reasons. Basically, what I was thinking about was:
1. People learn to manipulate others
2. Become drug addicts
3. Learn to manipulate for a very specific cause

The key lesson here was the presence of the word learn. 'Learning manipulation' would only happen once, its application, however, might change based on the stage of addiction. Hence, if my case were true, the verb in the sentence would have been use instead of learn.

1. People learn to manipulate others
2. Become drug addicts
3. Use manipulation tactics for a specific cause

[b]GMATNinja : Could you please tell me if my understanding is correct?[/b] What if option A were: 'After becoming addicted, people use manipulation tactics to obtain drugs' - in that case, would this option weaken our conclusion that manipulation is more likely to lead to addiction?

(C) Some non-addicts manipulate other people more than some addicts do.
We can have 3 categories of people:
i) Non-addicts who don't manipulate
ii) Non-addicts who manipulate
iii) Addicts who manipulate

This argument seems to be saying that x people in group (ii) are more manipulative (whatever that means) than y people in group iii
However, we were simply concerned with a comparison of people in group i) and group ii)

Hence, out of scope

(D) People who are likely to become addicts exhibit unusual behavior patterns other than frequent manipulation of other people
GMATNinja's explanation for this is perfect- patterns 'other than' could mean maybe they frequently manipulate, maybe they don't.

Let's take a step back and look at the passage to get any clues we can from there before answering your questions.

We're told that the researcher's conclusion is:

that people who frequently manipulate other people are likely to become addicts

The evidence provided for this is that drug addicts tend to manipulate people "a great deal more" than nonaddicts do.

The second gap you mention in your post is particularly important here -- there is a correlation between manipulative behavior and drug addiction. However, we have no information on whether one of them causes the other.

Let's look at (A) first:

You're correct to have noticed the use of the word learn but it's not enough to focus on that and not the rest of the answer choice. You should also be focusing on the word after.

If the drug addicts did not learn to manipulate people until after they had become addicted, then we cannot say they were manipulative before their addiction. It is possible that many drug addicts were not manipulative before becoming addicted but are manipulative now that they are addicted. This would point the causality in the opposite direction to the researcher's conclusion.

Therefore, it would not be correct to say that manipulative people are more likely to become drug addicts. This is why (A) weakens the conclusion.

Before answering your next question, there's a caveat that you really don't benefit from changing the answer choices. You can only argue with what's been written in the question.

However, changing "learn" to "use" in (A) would not weaken the answer choice. In this case, there is nothing to say these drug addicts did not use manipulation before they became addicts. This removes the possibility of the argument outlined above and, therefore, does not weaken the conclusion.

(C) says:

We are not necessarily only interested in the people in your group (i) and group (iii) -- the argument in the passage suggests people in group (ii) are more likely to become addicts than the people in group (i), so we shouldn't ignore them.

The passage says it's more likely that manipulative people will become addicts. There are two reasons why (C) does not weaken the conclusion.

First, the researcher's conclusion does not rely on every manipulative person becoming an addict. Some manipulative people can remain addiction-free and not weaken the researcher's conclusion. In the same vein, some addicts may not be manipulative at all -- so it would make sense that some nonaddicts are more manipulative than these addicts. This is enough to eliminate (C) but let's look at another reason.

The researcher's conclusion is that manipulative people are more likely to become addicts. There's nothing in (C) to suggest that the nonaddicts mentioned won't become addicts themselves eventually. These people are demonstrating the behavior the researcher is talking about, so the researcher thinks they are more likely to become addicts, they are just not addicted yet.

It's not that (C) is out of scope, it's that (C) doesn't give us any reason to doubt that manipulative people are more likely to become addicts. This gives us the reasons we need to eliminate (C).

I hope that helps!

This is a classic weakener where the answer tends to have the opposite cause-effect relationship from the passage.
So as per the passage: X leads to Y
Weakener: No, Y leads to X

A fits the bill perfectly

Hi Experts,

I solved this question in under 1 minute as the right answer was so obvious to me and right in my face after reading the question stem. Therefore, I didn't even read options B, C, D, and E. I don't do this when I am unsure of the answer in which case I read all the options.

Is it advisable to just select an option that you are sure of and move on to the next question, without reading the other options, in the real test?

Great question!

Although you got away with skipping answer choices on this question, this is a dangerous strategy. Sure, it saves you some time, but it's not worth the risk of missing a gettable question.

Keep in mind that an adaptive test like the GMAT punishes you severely for missing easy questions, so this risky approach could seriously backfire if it causes you to miss a question that you should have answered correctly.

Instead of rushing through or skipping answer choices, try to develop the habit of methodically analyzing each one. When eliminating an answer choice, make sure you can articulate why you're getting rid of it (and the same if you want to keep it). Answer choices can sometimes look tempting at first glance, but once you read them all, you end up catching a flaw you didn't see initially.

Bottom line: the time you save by skipping answer choices isn't worth the risk of missing an easy questions -- especially on an adaptive test like the GMAT. Instead of rushing, be methodical in your eliminations.

For more on this, check out our CR Guide for Beginners here.

I hope that helps a bit!