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. 2018 Nov 21;3(1):44.
doi: 10.1186/s41235-018-0135-2.

People's explanatory preferences for scientific phenomena

Deena Skolnick Weisberg  1 , Emily J Hopkins  2 , Jordan C V Taylor  3
Affiliations

People's explanatory preferences for scientific phenomena

Deena Skolnick Weisberg et al. Cogn Res Princ Implic. .

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Informed consent of all participants was obtained and their rights were protected according to the Declaration of Helsinki (University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board, exempt). Data from this study will be made available on the Open Science Framework.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
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
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
Fig. 3
Proportion of times each method was selected across all phenomena
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Average number of methods selected on the all useful methods question by sample and field of the phenomenon
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Responses when asked to match methods to fields. Arrows indicate the intended field for each method
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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