Empirical proof that empirical proof bolsters bullshit explanations

Probably I should wait until later when my head is clearer to post about this, but it’s just too awesomely meta for me to wait.

You know how you read things that back this or that point about human behavior by citing fMRI pictures of neurons firing in some section of the brain? I’ve written stuff like this myself. It sounds so impressive: A picture of what’s happening in the brain! That proves … something! It’s a classic example of deploying rational empirical expertise, or something that certainly looks/sounds like it, to make a point sound more convincing.

Well. Some delightfully wiseacre academic types have apparently done a study about how the citation of neuroscience “evidence” affects the reaction of the reader/listener. The upshot is: stuff that seems picture-of-the-brain empirical is often rewarded with more credibility than it might actually deserve.

Now, I say “apparently” because — hilariously — I haven’t read the paper (seems you have to be a subscriber to the journal to get access to it, and I haven’t had time to investigate further). I’ve read the abstract, and two blog posts about it.

The paper is called “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations.” From the abstract, it seems that the researchers tested three different groups: “naive adults,” students of neuroscience, and neuroscience experts. Each was presented with a description of some psychological phenomenon, and an explanation for it — sometimes a logical explanation, sometimes bullshit. In some cases, each sort of explanation cited neuroscience data. “Crucially,” the abstract says, “the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation.”

Results?

Subjects in the two nonexpert groups … judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Fantastic.

The pointer here comes from the blog Neuromarketing, whose author humorously sums up the implications: “Cloak BS in neuroscientific jargon, and people find it more plausible!”

(The author also kids: “Those are interesting findings that would be a lot more credible if backed up with fMRI scans.” It says something about me that I find that to be a truly amusing joke.)

The other blog post I read is this, which gives a more detailed summation of the study itself.