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Abstract
& Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to gener- vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience in-
ate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific formation was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as
information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups
explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones.
people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged
this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naı̈ve that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience infor-
adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience ex- mation were more satisfying than explanations without. The
perts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on
by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking other-
explanation vs. bad explanation) 2 (without neuroscience wise salient problems in these explanations. &
INTRODUCTION
(Lombrozo & Carey, 2006; Kelemen, 1999). People also
Although it is hardly mysterious that members of the tend to rate longer explanations as more similar to ex-
public should find psychological research fascinating, perts’ explanations (Kikas, 2003), fail to recognize circu-
this fascination seems particularly acute for findings that larity (Rips, 2002), and are quite unaware of the limits
were obtained using a neuropsychological measure. In- of their own abilities to explain a variety of phenomena
deed, one can hardly open a newspaper’s science sec- (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). In general, people often believe
tion without seeing a report on a neuroscience discovery explanations because they find them intuitively satisfying,
or on a new application of neuroscience findings to eco- not because they are accurate (Trout, 2002).
nomics, politics, or law. Research on nonneural cogni- In line with this body of research, we propose that
tive psychology does not seem to pique the public’s people often find neuroscience information alluring be-
interest in the same way, even though the two fields are cause it interferes with their abilities to judge the quality
concerned with similar questions. of the psychological explanations that contain this infor-
The current study investigates one possible reason why mation. The presence of neuroscience information may
members of the public find cognitive neuroscience so be seen as a strong marker of a good explanation, re-
particularly alluring. To do so, we rely on one of the gardless of the actual status of that information within
functions of neuroscience information in the field of psy- the explanation. That is, something about seeing neu-
chology: providing explanations. Because articles in both roscience information may encourage people to believe
the popular press and scientific journals often focus on they have received a scientific explanation when they
how neuroscientific findings can help to explain human have not. People may therefore uncritically accept any
behavior, people’s fascination with cognitive neuroscience explanation containing neuroscience information, even
can be redescribed as people’s fascination with explana- in cases when the neuroscience information is irrelevant
tions involving a neuropsychological component. to the logic of the explanation.
However, previous research has shown that people To test this hypothesis, we examined people’s judg-
have difficulty reasoning about explanations (for reviews, ments of explanations that either do or do not contain
see Keil, 2006; Lombrozo, 2006). For instance, people can neuroscience information, but that otherwise do not dif-
be swayed by teleological explanations when these are not fer in content or logic. All three studies reported here
warranted, as in cases where a nonteleological process, used a 2 (explanation type: good vs. bad) 2 (neurosci-
such as natural selection or erosion, is actually implicated ence: without vs. with) design. This allowed us to see
both people’s baseline abilities to distinguish good psy-
chological explanations from bad psychological explana-
Yale University tions as well as any influence of neuroscience information
D 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20:3, pp. 470–477
on this ability. If logically irrelevant neuroscience infor- circular restatements of the phenomenon, hence, not
mation affects people’s judgments of explanations, this explanatory (see Table 1 for a sample item).
would suggest that people’s fascination with neuropsy- For the With Neuroscience conditions, we added neu-
chological explanations may stem from an inability or roscience information to the good and bad explanations
unwillingness to critically consider the role that neurosci- from the Without Neuroscience conditions. The added
ence information plays in these explanations. neuroscience information had three important features:
(1) It always specified that the area of activation seen in
the study was an area already known to be involved in
tasks of this type, circumventing the interpretation that
EXPERIMENT 1
the neuroscience information added value to the expla-
Methods nation by localizing the phenomenon. (2) It was always
Subjects identical or nearly identical in the good explanation and
the bad explanation for a given phenomenon. Any
There were 81 participants in the study (42 women,
general effect of neuroscience information on judgment
37 men, 2 unreported; mean age = 20.1 years, SD =
should thus be seen equally for good explanations and
4.2 years, range = 18–48 years, based on 71 reported
bad explanations. Additionally, any differences that may
ages). We randomly assigned 40 subjects to the With-
occur between the good explanation and bad explana-
out Neuroscience condition and 41 to the With Neuro-
tion conditions would be highly unlikely to be due to
science condition. Subjects thus saw explanations that
any details of the neuroscience information itself. (3)
either always did or always did not contain neuroscience
Most importantly, in no case did the neuroscience
information. We used this between-subjects design to
information alter the underlying logic of the explanation
prevent subjects from directly comparing explanations
itself. This allowed us to test the effect of neuroscience
that did and did not contain neuroscience, providing a
information on the task of evaluating explanations,
stronger test of our hypothesis.
independent of any value added by such information.1
Before the study began, three experienced cognitive
neuroscientists confirmed that the neuroscience infor-
Materials
mation did not add value to the explanations.
We wrote descriptions of 18 psychological phenomena
(e.g., mutual exclusivity, attentional blink) that were meant
Procedure
to be accessible to a reader untrained in psychology or
neuroscience. For each of these items, we created two Subjects were told that they would be rating explana-
types of explanations, good and bad, neither of which tions of scientific phenomena, that the studies they
contained neuroscience. The good explanations in most would read about were considered solid, replicable re-
cases were the genuine explanations that the researchers search, and that the explanations they would read were
gave for each phenomenon. The bad explanations were not necessarily the real explanations for the phenomena.
drop in satisfaction ratings for the good explanations, We analyzed subjects’ ratings of how satisfying they
whereas bad explanations could not possibly have been found the explanations in the four conditions. We found
improved by what the experts knew to be an improper ap- that subjects in all groups could tell the difference be-
plication of neuroscience information. Informal post hoc tween good explanations and bad explanations, regard-
questioning of several participants in this study indicated less of the presence of neuroscience. Reasoning about
that they were indeed sensitive to the awkwardness these types of explanations thus does not seem to be
and irrelevance of the neuroscience information in the difficult in general because even the participants in our
explanations. novice group showed a robust ability to differentiate
These results from expert subjects confirm that the between good and bad explanations.
neuroscience information in the With Neuroscience con- Our most important finding concerns the effect that
ditions should not be seen as adding value to the expla- explanatorily irrelevant neuroscience information has on
nations. The results from the two nonexpert groups are subject’s judgments of the explanations. For novices and
thus due to these subjects’ misinterpretations of the students, the addition of such neuroscience information
neuroscience information, not the information itself. encouraged them to judge the explanations more favor-
ably, particularly the bad explanations. That is, extrane-
ous neuroscience information makes explanations look
GENERAL DISCUSSION more satisfying than they actually are, or at least more
satisfying than they otherwise would be judged to be.
Summary of Results The students in the cognitive neuroscience class showed
The three experiments reported here explored the im- no benefit of training, demonstrating that only a semes-
pact of adding scientific-sounding but empirically and ter’s worth of instruction is not enough to dispel the
conceptually uninformative neuroscience information effect of neuroscience information on judgments of ex-
to both good and bad psychological explanations. Three planations. Many people thus systematically misunder-
groups of subjects (novices, neuroscience class students, stand the role that neuroscience should and should
and neuroscience experts) read brief descriptions of not play in psychological explanations, revealing that
psychological phenomena followed by a good or bad logically irrelevant neuroscience information can be
explanation that did or did not contain logically irrelevant seductive—it can have much more of an impact on par-
neuroscience information. Although real neuropsycho- ticipants’ judgments than it ought to.
logical data certainly can provide insight into behavior However, the impact of superfluous neuroscience in-
and into psychological mechanisms, we specifically formation is not unlimited. Although novices and stu-
wanted to investigate the possible effects of the presence dents rated bad explanations as more satisfying when
of neuroscience information, regardless of the role that they contained neuroscience information, experts did
this information plays in an explanation. The neurosci- not. In fact, subjects in the expert group tended to rate
ence information in the With Neuroscience condition good explanations with neuroscience information as
thus did not affect the logic or content of the psycholog- worse than good explanations without neuroscience,
ical explanations, allowing us to see whether the mere indicating their understanding that the added neurosci-
mention of a neural process can affect subjects’ judg- ence information was inappropriate for the phenome-
ments of explanations. non being described. There is thus some noticeable