Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations

Abstract

Previous work showed that people find explanations more satisfying when they contain irrelevant neuroscience information. The current studies investigate why this effect happens. In Study 1 ( N=322), subjects judged psychology explanations that did or did not contain irrelevant neuroscience information. Longer explanations were judged more satisfying, as were explanations containing neuroscience information, but these two factors made independent contributions. In Study 2 ( N=255), subjects directly compared good and bad explanations. Subjects were generally successful at selecting the good explanation except when the bad explanation contained neuroscience and the good one did not. Study 3 ( N=159) tested whether neuroscience jargon was necessary for the effect, or whether it would obtain with any reference to the brain. Responses to these two conditions did not differ. These results confirm that neuroscience information exerts a seductive effect on people’s judgments, which may explain the appeal of neuroscience information within the public sphere.

Individual differences in receptivity to scientific bullshit

“…Recent studies support the idea that people trust scientific terminology even when it is irrelevant or unnecessary: Laypeople are more likely to accept scientific explanations that are accompanied with irrelevant neuroscientific jargon (Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson & Gray, 2008;Weisberg, Taylor & Hopkins, 2015); in particular, scientific jargon makes non-experts more willing to accept low-quality scientific arguments. Similarly, experienced readers will judge scientific abstracts as higher quality when they include irrelevant mathematical equations (Eriksson, 2012).…”

The political leaning of the neuroscience discourse about school education in the French press from 2000 to 2020

“…It seems that educational neuroscience was too appealing to him and his voters. This seductive allure of neuroscience has been already pointed out (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015;Weisberg et al, 2008;Weisberg et al, 2015), including in the context of educational topics (Im et al, 2017). According to Fernandez-Duque et al (2015), this seductive allure "may stem from the lay belief that the brain is the best explanans for mental phenomena" (p. 926).…”

Neuroscience explanations really do satisfy: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the seductive allure of neuroscience

“…The SANE effect persists even after controlling for possible confounds such as length of the neuroscience explanation, and the use of jargon (Rhodes et al, 2014;Weisberg et al, 2015). However, numerous reports of null findings indicate limitations of the effect (Baker et al, 2013;Gruber and Dickerson, 2012;Marshall et al, 2017;Michael et al, 2013;Schweitzer et al, 2013;Van Elk, 2019;West et al, 2014).…”

“…More broadly, it is important to understand what types of impact neuroscience may have on laypeople. Some of the strongest SANE effects are in improving ratings of satisfaction with explanations of psychological phenomena (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015;Im et al, 2017;Weisberg et al, 2008Weisberg et al, , 2015. This not only suggests a preference for an increasingly reductionistic, neurological understanding of the human experience, but also that neuroscience information influences decision making that is based on scientific evidence.…”

“…In an additional study (Diekmann et al, 2015), we only used the cohort of psychology students and excluded the expert groups. We excluded Study 3 from Weisberg et al (2015) because it reused data from its own Study 1. In one study (Aspinwall et al, 2012), neuroscientific information was offered by prosecution and defense, as aggravating and mitigating evidence, respectively, which could not be combined with other studies, in which neuroscience is offered only as mitigating evidence.…”