The Allure of Neuroscience Explanation

Via Language Log, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, & Jeremy R. Gray, "The seductive allure of neuroscience explanation", in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Comments

[Matthew]

Fascinating. I wonder if the effect of the neuro-nonsense would be similar to faulty explanations with genetics and other "hot" scientific paradigms. What would be very interesting is to see how cognate studies of human behavior in fields like neuro-economics are affected by this bias since "experts" in other social science fields may not be able to weed out the noise at least not as well as psychologists and neurologists.