Category: Education

‘Neuroscience’ persuasive, even when irrelevant

Cognitive Daily, one of my favorite websites, has a great piece on a study that examined whether or not people find references to brain areas ‘lighting up’ in neuroimaging (one of my least favorite expressions) and other neuro-speak more persuasive than plain old psychology articles. The piece is titled, ‘When we see a brain “light up,” [most of] our brains shut off.’ Author Dave Munger reports that he originally found out about the research through an online article in Seed Magazine (available here) (I hope I’m not inadvertently misrepresenting anything Munger has written…). The newly published study, ‘The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,’ has appeared in the Journal of Cognitive Science (abstract here).

The study set out to find whether or not a bit of neuroscience-speak can persuade people, even when explanations are bad: ‘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’ (from the abstract). The crucial part of this is that, according to experts, the neuroscience in the experimental passages was irrelevant to whether or not the argument being advanced was valid or not.

Munger describes the original study as finding, not that neuroscience is always more persuasive than psychological explanation, but that neuroscience makes bad explanations more persuasive. He explains:

While there was no significant difference in the results for good explanations, people rated the bad explanations significantly better when they included irrelevant neuroscience. The team repeated the experiment on college undergraduates who were enrolled in an introductory neuroscience class, and the results were similar, both at the beginning and the end of the semester. The students actually rated all the explanations significantly better when neuroscience was included, whether or not the explanations themselves were good.

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Poverty & Programs

This article, A Home Remedy for Juvenile Offenders, strikes me as relevant to our earlier discussion on poverty and the brain.  While I think the emphasis on “therapy” places too much weight on psychology and the individual, nonetheless I admire the overall idea, as related here:

The basic idea is to reach and help borderline youths at a moment of crisis, and turn them away from a more serious criminal path. By treating them in the context of their families and environments rather than in isolation, officials found that recidivism was usually less than half that of residential correction programs. The city says that it hopes its program will be as successful, but that it will take many years before it can be sure. Still, at roughly $17,000 per child, such in-home therapy programs cost a fraction of the annual expense of keeping a child in secure detention, which can be $140,000 to $200,000. 

My hope is that anthropology can and will add to this sort of work.  Still, I am not sure anthropology has developed enough as an applied science where it can point to clear and specific ways to make a difference in these social and material environments (please comment if you do have some specific ideas or programs).  So the recognition of individual differences (including moments of crisis), the importance of life pathways, and the focus on social context strike me as quite a good start. 

Beyond Right and Left

I came across David McKnight’s reflection on his own book of the same name, Beyond Right and Left, which tackles political ideas and the fight over “human nature.”  We’ve dealt with some similar ideas in the critical discussion we had over Steven Pinker and his essay on a moral instinct.  McKnight’s take seems to be more thoughtful. 

McKnight’s argument boils down to this: “Any plans for social reform must take account of the limitations presented by human nature. As remarkable as human diversity and capacity is, it is not unlimited. Any new political vision which assumes we can create societies without conflict or without self interest, is doomed to fail. Attempts at perfection, in politics or religion, have proven disastrous.” 
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The Family Dinner Deconstructed

National Public Radio had a radio broadcast yesterday morning on “The Family Dinner Deconstructed.”  Here’s the blurb: “The ritual of a family dinner has been praised as an antidote to bad grades and bad habits in kids. But as researchers look closer at the family dinner, they raise the question: Is it the mere act of eating together that counts, or is it that strong families are already more likely to have a family dinner?” 

The reporter does a wonderful job talking with a variety of researcher to focus in on the proximate features of the family dinner—conversations, relationships, rituals, emotions—and how they can impact physical and mental health.  For example, the quality of conversations at mealtime was a better predictor of reading development than parents actually reading to their children.  But what mattered was the content on dinner conservation, that it was complex and “rich with explanation, story telling, and more.”  Similarly, for physical and mental development (for example, eating disorders), specific behaviors at dinner proved important: roles assigned (setting the table, beginning and end to dinner); a genuine concern about daily activities; and a sense of empathy and concern for each other. 

While the radio cast pushes a double-blind study to “determine” the specific effects of a good-quality family dinner versus dinner-as-usual, the announcer rightly acknowledges that doing such research is a daunting prospect.  I would add that an ethnographic approach that builds on this educational and psychological research and that teases out the relationships between dinner, family interaction, and development as a joint physical-mental phenomenon could also add some great insights.

Blogging and Public Intellectuals?

Todd, who commented on the Wending post, has an interesting discussion of “On Being A Public Intellectual” over at his blog Todd’s Hammer.  He engages Russel Jacoby’s argument that public intellectuals have basically perished given the post-modern turn, the professionalization of the academy, and the rise of modern media.  

I might counter that we have a new breed of public intellectual—people like Steven Pinker.  The star professors who write popular books and who appear on television, and who command super-sized salaries from universities.  They sell ideas and, in many cases, reassurances to the American public.  To take a comment by Robert Steele, a top 50 reviewer on Amazon, about Joseph Nye’s book, Soft Power:  

This book, perhaps deliberately so, but I suspect not, is out of touch with mainstream scholarship such as the last 50 books I have reviewed for Amazon. It is one massive “Op-Ed”, and its sources are virtually all “Op-Eds” (a number of them not written by the purported authors), with the result that this book gets an A for a good idea and a C-, at best, for scholarship. One simple example: the sum total of the author’s references on “virtual communities”, one of the most important ideas of this century, is one Op-Ed from the Baltimore Sun.

But in looking at the posts on this blog, the ones that have attracted the most attention are ones in the public domain—the critique of Steven Pinker or the Time Magazine article on love—as well as ones that address issues of everyday discussion—our mood affecting our health, IQ and race, our sense of balance. 
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Will Power as Mental Muscle

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchThere’s an interesting blog post here about “How to Boost Your Willpower,” which tells us that “researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.”

 Well, how about a cultural muscle too?  After all, we’re talking about a cultural trait too!  In my research in Colombia, knowing how to manage limits and having reasons to say no help explain lower rates of illegal drug use there, despite plenty of risk factors and access to drugs. 

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