People's explanatory preferences for scientific phenomena

Abstract

Previous work has found that people are drawn to explanations of psychological phenomena when these explanations contain neuroscience information, even when that information is irrelevant. This preference may be due to a general preference for reductive explanations; however, prior work has not investigated whether people indeed prefer such explanations or whether this preference varies by scientific discipline. The current study asked 82 participants to choose which methods would be most appropriate for investigating topics in six scientific fields. Participants generally preferred methods that either matched the field of investigation (e.g., biology for biology) or that came from the immediately more reductive field (e.g., chemistry for biology). Both of these patterns were especially evident for the pairing of psychology and neuroscience. Additionally, participants selected significantly more methods as being useful for explaining neuroscience phenomena. These results suggest that people's sense of the relations among scientific fields are fairly well calibrated but display some general attraction to neuroscience.

Fig. 1

Proportion of times each level method was selected on the all useful methods question, broken down by the field of the phenomenon

Fig. 2

Proportion of times each level method was selected on the best method question, broken down by the field of the phenomenon

Fig. 3

Proportion of times each method was selected across all phenomena

Fig. 4

Average number of methods selected on the all useful methods question by sample and field of the phenomenon

Fig. 5

Responses when asked to match methods to fields. Arrows indicate the intended field for each method