Read the following argument /passage carefully a n d answer the question that follows. A psychological scientist wanted to measure a subjective emotion-happiness. He wanted a rating scale with ratings from 1 to 6 to measure happiness by asking people question about their well-being. But this was difficult as somebody’s five might be six for the other. He thought of a solution to this problem. He started thinking of his training days when some cheap thermometers that were not well calibrated were used to measure temperature. A few people with normal temperatures got readings other than 98.6 and occasionally two people with the same temperature used to get different readings. These inaccuracies caused people to seek medical treatment they didn’t need or to miss getting treatment they needed. So buggy thermometers were sometimes a problem but not always. Some thermometers would underestimate, some would overestimate, but as long as enough people were measured, the inaccuracies would cancel themselves out. Even with poorly calibrated instruments, large groups of people could be compared. He thought rating scale is like a buggy thermometer. Its inaccuracies make it inappropriate for some exact measurements (for example, saying exactly how happy John was at 10 : 42 am on July 3, 2010), but it’s appropriate for most of the measurements needed to measure happiness in a large group of people. What is the method of reasoning used by the psychological scientist?

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Examsnet · Accepted Answer

Correct Answer is : Thought and observation

CMAT 2016 Solved Question Paper