Is your research boring? Just add neuroscience!

There’s a great new study from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Non-experts were asked to read explanations of psychological phenomenon with and without neuroscience explanations in them, such as “This was thought to be due to the involvement of frontal lobes on executive control.”

What is comforting was that with good, conclusive explanations of these phenomenon, non-experts were satisfied with explanations whether or not they contained neuroscience. However, bad explanations were rated differently by non-experts. Bad explanations that included neuroscience were rated more highly than bad explanations that did not have any neuroscience in them.

So the next time your results aren’t quite up to snuff? Add in a dash of neuroscience and get that paper published!

Link to the writeup: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/when_we_see_a_brain_light_up_o.php

The paper citation: Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., Gray, J.R. (2008). The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470-477.