The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
Open accessAbstract
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even 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. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) × 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert 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 nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.
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The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
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“This conclusion suggests that these two groups of subjects fell prey to a reasoning heuristic (e.g., Shafir, Smith, & Osherson, 1990; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, 1981).”
BackgroundHow seductive details do their damage: A theory of cognitive interest in science learning.
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Cited by
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2012) · Educational Psychologist · doi:10.1080/00461520.2012.722805 · Cited by 2,334
Van Dam, N. T., van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., Meissner, T., Lazar, S. W., Kerr, C. E., Gorchov, J., et al. (2018) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/1745691617709589 · Cited by 1,506
Do “brain-training” programs work?
Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016) · Psychological Science in the Public Interest · doi:10.1177/1529100616661983 · Cited by 1,183
Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments
Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037/a0026699 · Cited by 1,031
Szucs, D., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2017) · PLOS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2000797 · Cited by 761
Metadata
- Authors
- Weisberg, D. S., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R.
- Venue
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 2008-03-01
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 470-477
- ISSN
- 0898-929X (ISSN-L)
- 1530-8898
- OpenAlex
- W2099908396
- Cited by
- 1,063
- References
- 5
- FWCI
- 14.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Weisberg, D. S., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R. (2008). The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2008.20040
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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