A US study has found that divorce does not typically make adults

Question

A US study has found that divorce does not typically make adults happier than staying in an unhappy marriage. The researchers tracked and interviewed, for forty-five years, 1594 unhappily married couples, of whom about 70 percent divorced midway through the study. The unhappily married adults who divorced and remained so for the rest of the period of the study stated that they were more depressed, on average than when they were unhappily married. This was true even after controlling for race, age, gender, and income. Therefore, unhappily married couples are better off staying in an unhappy marriage than getting divorced.

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

(A) The couples who continued to stay in an unhappy marriage did so primarily due to marriage-counseling experts' help.

(B) Most of the couples in an unhappy marriage had, on occasion, extended periods of marital unhappiness that were worse than such episodes in the lives of those who were divorced.

(C) The loneliness divorced adults experience exaggerates in their minds the emotional stress of a bad marriage.

(D) An adult who divorced a spouse of bad marriage, when he or she remarried, found a more significant and lasting happiness than when that adult had been divorced.

(E) Lonely divorcees tend to have a significantly more exaggerated view of their current episodes of depression than of the episodes when they were in the marriage.

RohitJeo · Accepted Answer

shouldnt b be the answer? Doesnt b directly attack the conclusion by stating that being unhappily married brings about more trauma than being divorced?

In option e, even if divorces exaggerate within their mind, they still feel more unhappiness and therefore would strengthen the conclusion right?

JoeSal · Answer

I agree. Even if they exaggerate their unhappiness, then that means they are still more unhappy than when they were in an unhappy marriage, which does not weaken the conclusion. Please help enlighten us on the answer E. Thank you!

AJ2606 · Answer

Here is my 2 cents on this question. I got it wrong the first time I solved but I got it right the second time. 
The conclusion of the argument is: Unhappy marriage > Divorce. 
To weaken this argument, we need to select a statement that somehow establishes that Divorce >= Unhappy marriage. Let's dive into the options :

(A) The couples who continued to stay in an unhappy marriage did so primarily due to marriage-counseling experts' help.
 Irrelevant

(B) Most of the couples in an unhappy marriage had, on occasion, extended periods of marital unhappiness that were worse than such episodes in the lives of those who were divorced.
 Key word here is   on occasion  . We do not know how frequent these episodes were in unhappy marriage vs divorce.

(C) The loneliness divorced adults experience exaggerates in their minds the emotional stress of a bad marriage.
 There is no comparison with an unhappy marriage. Also, this could be happening in unhappy marriage as well.

(D) An adult who divorced a spouse of bad marriage, when he or she remarried, found a more significant and lasting happiness than when that adult had been divorced.
 This is the option that I chose as pre-thinking which was wrong. We are concerned with only unhappy marriage and divorce. A new factor of remarriage is not what we are concerned with. Also, it could be consistent in both scenarios.

(E) Lonely divorcees tend to have a significantly more exaggerated view of their current episodes of depression than of the episodes when they were in the marriage.
 This indicates that divorcees could exaggerate their view and depression which concludes that they could be more happy but they are choosing not to be. So the scenario of Divorce >= Unhappy marriage could be a possibility. -    Correct Answer

Hope this helps.

arushi118 · Answer

In option E, it still will lead to the conclusion that they are unhappy being divorced right? Why not option B - as atleast sometimes the ones who are divorced will be happier than they would have been if not divorced?

GMATNinja · Answer

I feel your pain here. (And keep in mind that this isn't an official GMAT question, so I'd take it with a grain of salt.)

Boiled way down, the argument is that unhappily married couples should stay together because the ones who get divorced reported that they were more depressed, post-divorce.

We're looking for an answer that undermines this logic and suggests that maybe people should still get divorced, despite these reports. (B) is certainly tempting -- I held on to it on my first pass.

The key flaw in (B) is the detail in the language, "on occasion." Well, if things are only worse in your marriage,  on occasion , but divorce is going to cause you to get more depressed overall, it still might be worth it to stay in the unhappy marriage.

Contrast this with (E). The whole argument is dependent on the idea that divorced people report being more depressed after they got divorced. But if we can't trust these reports because divorced people, in general, have a distorted view of their depression, we lose the one piece of evidence to support the conclusion.

Is it still  possible  that divorced people are more miserable? Sure. But because we've poked holes in the evidence, the logic of the argument falls apart.

Is (E) a perfect answer? Nope. Is it the best of the bunch because it's the only one that undermines the evidence presented? Yep. So (E) it will have to be.

I hope that helps!

dolortempore · Answer

My Take on the Official Answer!

I’ve been thinking about this CR question, and I feel the  official answer (E) doesn’t really weaken the conclusion in a strong way . The conclusion is that “unhappily married couples are better off staying in an unhappy marriage than getting divorced.”

The study only tracked people who divorced and remained divorced. That’s a major limitation. Choice (D) points out that divorced adults who later remarried found greater and lasting happiness. This directly undermines the conclusion because it shows divorce can actually lead to a better outcome than staying stuck in an unhappy marriage.

By contrast, (E) just says divorced adults “exaggerate” their depression compared to when they were married. To me, that feels speculative. How do we measure exaggeration of depression? It doesn’t establish that divorce leads to better outcomes—it only questions whether the data was perfectly reliable. That’s not enough to overturn the conclusion.

So in my view, (D) is the stronger weakening option because it highlights the study’s narrow scope and shows a clear path to greater happiness that the conclusion ignores .

(E) seems too assumption-heavy to be convincing.

A US study has found that divorce does not typically make adults

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A US study has found that divorce does not typically make adults

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