Yale University PhD student Deena Skolnick Weisberg just sent out notice that her article, "The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations," is now in press at the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. In short, Weisberg's study suggests that people are much more willing to buy bad scientific explanations of phenomenon if they contain some sort of neuroscience reference - such as a comment that the phenomenon is associated with activity in a certain part of the brain - even if that reference is irrelevant to the logic of the argument being made. Her work provides a little confirmatory data for some long-held suspicions about the power of neuro-talk to overwhelm good critical thinking. Skolnick notes that this power deserves consideration given the increasing use of neuroimaging or neuroscience data in courtroom evaluations of guilt, free will, and responsibility.
Weisberg's initial data received a lot of prepublication attention back in June 2006, when Paul Bloom referenced it in his Seed magazine discussion of fMRI hype, "Seduced by the Flickering Lights." Her findings, and the article in general, inspired a lot of discussion about the value/hype ratio of fMRI science and about the general social impact of neuroscience research. Although not all of them agreed with Bloom's assertions (for example, that fMRI was dramatically overfunded and overvalued), I remember many of my colleagues relishing the opportunity for more critical discussion of contemporary neuroimaging. Perhaps Weisberg's new article will spark a continuation of that discussion in the academy and the blogworld - I'm very happy she's found a home for it.
It's worth note that some significant changes to the findings have occurred since Paul Bloom's reference of Weisberg's original findings. The study evaluated the effect of neuroscience data on argument evaluation in three groups: novices, students in a cognitive neuroscience class, and scientific experts (cognitive neuroscientists). Bloom's version of the data suggested that even the Yale Psychology experts were seduced by the misleading neuroscience details. However, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience version reports significant effects only in the novice and neuroscience student groups, not the expert group. This pattern of results isn't particularly surprising, but it tells a slightly different story than we'd expected from the Seed article, which implicated that scientists as a whole had been duped by the neuroscience enterprise and imaging data. Make sure to update your neuroscience water-cooler talk, folks!
Until publication time, Weisberg's study can be accessed via her homepage, here.
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Update: It looks like Deena's last name has changed this year from Skolnick to Skolnick Weisberg. I've updated the entry accordingly. My apologies to the author.
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