Source: Business Insider, Dec 2016
if you want to convince someone that your explanation for something is the best way to explain it, you might want to tack on some useless (though accurate) information from a tangentially related scientific field.
It turns out that when you tack on additional information from a respected field of study, people think that makes an explanation more credible.
We think longer explanations are better than short ones and we prefer explanations that point to a goal or a reason for things happening, even if these things don’t actually help us understand a phenomenon.
As the authors behind this most recent paper note, previous research has also shown that we prefer explanations of psychology when they contain “logically irrelevant neuroscience information,” something known as the “seductive lure effect.”
some interesting exceptions and additional takeaways here.
- Good explanations matter, and were rated better than bad explanations (even if the bad explanations had reductive information).
- Adding useless reductive information made the biggest difference when researchers added neuroscience to an explanation of psychological science.
- Participants trusted psychology the least and — in the one exception to the general rule — didn’t think adding psychological explanations to social science made those explanations more credible (though these particular findings weren’t statistically significant).
- Study participants actually considered neuroscience more rigorous and prestigious than the sciences considered more fundamental by researchers (biology, chemistry, and physics). This could explain the big effect that neuroscience explanation has when added to explanations of psychological science.
- Mechanical Turk respondents thought the explanations with reductive information were better than undergraduates thought they were. That information made a big significant difference for them, but it was less of a big deal for undergraduates. Different groups of people are going to evaluate information in different ways, and neither of these groups of people can accurately represent the way the entire population evaluates information.
- People who were better at logical reasoning were better at evaluating explanation accurately (they gave less credence to reductive information). The researchers think this could mean that philosophers who have studied logic are less susceptible to this cognitive bias.
- People who knew more about science were also better at telling good explanations from bad explanations.