Beware Neuroscience Stories
Via Hamish Barney and Mark Liberman, a forthcoming Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper showing people are more willing to accept bad psychology explanations if they include irrelevant brain facts:
Irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. … Subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.
Mark says:
Skolnick et al. observe that neuroscience has a number of properties that make it especially effective as a rhetorical distractor, beyond the previously documented (and more general) "seductive details effect" — it points to reductionist and materialist explanations, it provides an almost unlimited source of jargon, it sits at the intersection of several high-status occupations, and (though not in this experiment) it offers pretty pictures.
There is reason to hope that neurosceince will eventually make important contributions to the cognitive and social sciences, but so far most things I see on the subject seem to offer below average contributions, especially relative to the publicity they receive.
Actually, I'd come down on the side of the normal people who get tricked by fake neuroscience. If they're presented with irrelevant neuroscience facts, it may make them feel that they're not fully understanding the logic. Hence, in ignorance, they rate the explanation more highly - "I can't say it's wrong, can't say it's right". So they honestly, and rationally, give it a middling score.
We want the man on the street to defer to those experts and explanations that we know are accurate - in science, economics and such. To do so, he has to trust scientific authority without understanding it. That means he'll also trust it when it's not justified (running this experiment on fundamentalist religious types would be interesting). To us, the difference between the logical flow of a text and the scientific statements in it is evident - but that's because we have the training.
Less excuses for the students, though.
Perhaps this bias could come to popular attention and reduced if we did some studies using functional brain scans of people reading about studies using functional brain scans.