THESE days, it can feel as though a psychological finding is inadequate unless it draws on the tangible wetness of neuroscience: the chemicals and brain areas. To discover, say, that a given activity is enjoyable is not enough. To reveal that it activates our reward pathways - now that’s science. To paraphrase the scepticism of philosopher Jerry Fodor: We always knew there was a difference between verbs and nouns, but once somebody showed they were associated with activity in different brain areas, well then we knew they were different ‘scientifically’.
Now Deena Weisberg and colleagues at Yale have formally tested the effect that adding neuroscience jargon has on people’s satisfaction with explanations of psychological findings. Naive participants, neuroscience students and neuroscience experts were presented with descriptions of psychological phenomena, such as mutual exclusivity and the attentional blink, together with both good and poor (i.e. circular) explanations of these phenomena.
Everyone, including the naive participants, found the bad explanations less satisfying than the good explanations. Crucially, however, among the naive participants and neuroscience students, those who read bad explanations containing gratuitous neuroscience references, reported being more satisfied with these bad explanations, than did the others who read bad explanations containing no neuroscience. By contrast, the presence or not of neuroscience content had no effect on the neuroscience experts’ satisfaction with the bad explanations, but irrelevant neuroscience did reduce their satisfaction with the good explanations.
The researchers surmised there could be several reasons why references to neuroscience make a bad explanation more satisfying for non-experts. For example, physiological analysis, though irrelevant, could give the impression that the explanation is connected with a wider, more insightful, explanatory system. Or, as brain-imaging expert Rik Henson has noted, perhaps people’s judgement is distracted by the seductive visual imagery - such as pictures of blobs on brains - with which neuroscience is associated.
The researchers said their findings could have serious implications for the application of neuroscience to social issues, such as when presented as evidence in court. ‘Even if expert practitioners can easily distinguish good neuroscience explanations from bad, they must not assume that those outside the discipline will be as discriminating,’ they wrote. The findings are in press at the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. CJ
|
Current