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. 2008 Mar;20(3):470-7.
doi: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20040.

The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations

Deena Skolnick Weisberg  1 , Frank C Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, Jeremy R Gray
Affiliations

The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations

Deena Skolnick Weisberg et al. J Cogn Neurosci. 2008 Mar.

Abstract

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 nonexpert 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 nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Novice group. Mean ratings of how satisfying subjects found the explanations. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Student group. Mean ratings of how satisfying subjects found the explanations. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Expert group. Mean ratings of how satisfying subjects found the explanations. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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