Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2015, Vol 10, Issue 5
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.
Authors and Affiliations
Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Jordan C. V. Taylor and Emily J. Hopkins
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678195
- DOI -
- Views 141
- Downloads 0
Anticipatory stress interferes with utilitarian moral judgment
A recent study indicates that acute stress affects moral decision making (Youssef et al., in press). The current study examines whether results can be replicated using a different kind of stressor and a different kind of...
Religion, group threat and sacred values
Sacred or protected values have important influences on decision making, particularly in the context of intergroup disputes. Thus far, we know little about the process of a value becoming sacred or why one person may be...
American attitudes toward nudges
To successfully select and implement nudges, policy makers need a psychological understanding of who opposes nudges, how they are perceived, and when alternative methods (e.g., forced choice) might work better. Using two...
Between me and we: The importance of self-profit versus social justifiability for ethical decision making
Current theories of dishonest behavior suggest that both individual profits and the availability of justifications drive cheating. Although some evidence hints that cheating behavior is most prevalent when both self-prof...
Investor regret: The role of expectation in comparing what is to what might have been
Investors, like any decision maker, feel regret when they compare the outcome of an investment with what the outcome would have been had they invested differently. We argue and show that this counterfactual comparison pr...