Why Can Neuroscience Jargon Make an Explanation Seem Better?

A weak psychological explanation can suddenly sound more scientific after a sentence saying that a particular brain region “lights up”. In a set of experiments published in 2008, participants read psychological phenomena followed by good or bad explanations, either with or without neuroscience information that was irrelevant to the explanation’s logic. Non-expert adults and students taking a neuroscience course were, on average, more satisfied by explanations containing the neuroscience material. The boost was especially noticeable for bad explanations. Neuroscience experts did not show the same pattern.

One possibility is that technical language creates the impression that a mechanism has already been identified. Because the brain is the biological basis of psychological activity, references to regions, scans or neurotransmitters can seem closer to a cause than a behavioural description. Readers may mistake that concreteness and authority for a stronger argument, without asking whether the extra information actually answers “why” or merely redescribes the same phenomenon in biological terms.

The study does not show that every brain image fools people, or that neuroscientific explanations are inherently suspect. The materials, participants’ knowledge and later study designs can all affect the size of the result. A better check is to remove the neuroscience sentence temporarily and ask whether the remaining explanation specifies a causal relation, considers alternatives and offers testable evidence. If its logic is unchanged, the jargon may have added credibility rather than explanatory power.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18004955/