The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information

Hopkins, Emily J.; Weisberg, Deena Skolnick; Taylor, Jordan

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.06.011

Cited by 99 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…Note this is an effect of neuroscientific description, not of brain images per se (Gruber and Dickerson, 2012; Hook and Farah, 2013; Schweitzer et al, 2013; Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015; but see McCabe and Castel, 2008; Farah and Hook, 2013), as observed in studies of 1,971 participants (Michael et al, 2013). Importantly, the appeal of neuroscience cannot be attributed to the addition of jargon or the status of neuroscience (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015), yet may represent a broader effect of reducing mechanisms down to their smaller parts (Hopkins et al, 2016). Therefore, the influence of neuroscientific defenses in court may represent the broader influence of neuroscientific arguments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

Blakey

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Neuroscience is increasingly used to infer the cognitive capacities of offenders from the activity and volume of different brain regions, with the resultant findings receiving great interest in the public eye. This field experiment tested the effects of public engagement in neuroscience on attitudes toward offenders. Brainstorm is a play about teenage brain development. Either before or after watching this play, 728 participants responded to four questions about the age of criminal responsibility, and the moral responsibility and dangerousness of a hypothetical young or adult offender. After watching the play, participants perceived the young offender as less likely to reoffend than the adult offender and the young, but not adult, offender as less morally responsible for his actions, especially on the first offense. Therefore, public engagement in the newest arrival to the criminological scene – neuroscience – may shift support for different youth justice responses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

Blakey

2017

Front. Psychol.

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“…Similarly, neurology and psychology shared a high family resemblance with one another, given that they were both attributed to studying "humans" and "behaviour" (Hernandez, 2015). Despite their similarities in subject matter, neuroscience is judged to be scientifically superior to psychology (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015;Hopkins, Weisberg, & Taylor, 2016). People possibly grant neuroscience with greater scientific credibility because of the reductionist approach that it takes in explaining psychological phenomena.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Psychology and neuroscience were not established disciplines at the time. Researchers that have included these disciplines, however, typically order the hierarchy with sociology at the top, followed by psychology, neuroscience, biology, chemistry, and physics (Hopkins, Weisberg, & Taylor, 2016). Disciplines higher up on the hierarchy are considered to study phenomena at a broader or more macroscopic level, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy are considered to study phenomena at a microscopic level (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, this theory speculates that the allure can more generally be extended to all sciences. Hopkins, Weisberg, and Taylor (2016) sought out to determine whether a reductionist explanation could account for the seductive allure of neuroscience. Thus, their study assessed whether it was specific to the neuroscience and psychology pairing (e.g., a preference for explanations of psychological phenomena that includes neuroscience information) or whether it extended to other scientific disciplines as well (e.g., a preference for explanations of biological phenomena that includes information about chemistry).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Some have characterized brain images as the "archetype of the prototypical scientific image" (Baker et al, 2015, p. 253;Feigenson, 2006). This may explain why neuroscience, the discipline most strongly associated with the brain (Morgan, 2017), is correspondingly judged to be the most prestigious science (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015;Hopkins, Weisberg, & Taylor, 2016). Furthermore, research has suggested that the allure of neuroscience stems from people's appeal to explanations of the mind that reference the brain (Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Undergraduates' Perceptions Towards Psychology As A Science: Differentiating Explicit Responses From Implicit Associations

Plagianakos¹

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Research has primarily adopted explicit measures to examine students' view about the scientific status of psychology (Friedrich, 1996). Such measures have been found to be influenced by social desirability characteristics, however (Bartels et al., 2009). Moreover, explicit measures that are more direct by nature tend to yield less favorable and less scientific attitudes towards psychology compared to less direct ones (Hartwig & Delin, 2003; Osborn et al., 2003;Provost et al., 2011;Webb, 1988). In this experiment, a go/no-go LDT was administered to both introduction to psychology students and upper year psychology majors to explore participants' scientific attitudes towards psychology at an implicit level (Perea, Rosa, & Gomez, 2002). Using this procedure, psychology's implicit associations with "science", methodological terminology, as well as scientific and psychological attributes were assessed. The data showed that implicit "science-psychology" associations increase with greater exposure to the psychological curriculum. Furthermore, implicit associations between "psychology" and methodological terminology similarly strengthened over time. These results suggest that students' propensity associate psychology with science after obtaining greater psychology-specific education can be observed at a more basic level of processing.

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A Refined and Further Defined Argument on the Limits of Neuroscience in Counseling: Response to Field, Luke, and Beeson and Miller

Wilkinson

2019

J Humanistic Counseling

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Responding to multiple critiques of his article on the limits of neuroscience in counseling (Wilkinson, 2018), the author further explores and defines these limits, clarifying his perspective on the hard problem of consciousness, the support–inform distinction, and the quadripartite humanistic neuroscience model. Identifying naive mischaracterizations of humanistic principles and practices, the author also discusses the limits of neuroscientific support in relation to neurofeedback, neuroeducation, and explanatory power. Finally, the author calls into question the accuracy of the term neurocounseling and the notion that neuroscientific evidence lends greater legitimacy to the counseling profession.

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The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information

Cited by 99 publications

References 28 publications

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

Undergraduates' Perceptions Towards Psychology As A Science: Differentiating Explicit Responses From Implicit Associations

A Refined and Further Defined Argument on the Limits of Neuroscience in Counseling: Response to Field, Luke, and Beeson and Miller

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