LSAT Weaken Practice Question: Reversed Causation
An original weaken question from our free Question of the Day rotation, built around a trap the LSAT reuses constantly: reversed causation. Try it first, then read the explanation — it teaches the move, not just the answer.
Your job:Make the conclusion less believable.
A personal-finance columnist reviewed a study of two thousand households and noted that those who kept detailed monthly budgets had, on average, forty percent more in savings than those who did not. She concluded that keeping a detailed budget causes households to accumulate more savings.
Which one of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the columnist's argument?
Show the answer & full explanation
The correct answer is B
The JBDM line
Just because budgeting households have more savings doesn't mean the budgeting caused the savings.
The maybes
- MaybeMaybe having spare money is what leads people to start budgeting.
- MaybeMaybe conscientious people both budget and save, and the trait does the work.
Why B is right
This flips the arrow. If households typically start budgeting AFTER their income comfortably exceeds expenses, then the surplus — the very thing that builds savings — comes first and produces the budgeting. The correlation survives; the columnist's causal direction doesn't.
Why the others are wrong
- AVariety of methods doesn't touch whether budgeting causes savings.
- CAn average claim tolerates exceptions; a few low-savings budgeters don't dent it.
- DA missing variable is an unknown, not an alternative explanation — it raises a question without answering it.
- EHow much time budgets take is irrelevant to what they cause.
Sammy's note
Every correlation hides a chicken-and-egg question. Always test the arrow's direction.
What's a JBDM line?
Just Because Doesn't Mean (JBDM) is the Burton Method's foundational framework for attacking LSAT arguments: identify the premise, identify the conclusion, then say "just because [premise] doesn't mean [conclusion]" and generate "maybes" — alternative explanations that expose the gap between them. That gap is what weaken, flaw, strengthen, and assumption questions all test, so every explanation on this page starts with the JBDM line. It's a micro-lesson in the system, not just an answer key.
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