Does expertise moderate the seductive allure of reductive explanations?

Abstract

Non-experts are unduly attracted to explanations of scientific phenomena that contain irrelevant reductive language (e.g., explanations of biological phenomena that mention chemistry; Hopkins, Weisberg, & Taylor, 2016). To determine if expertise would reduce this reasoning error, the current study recruited individuals with graduate-level training in six scientific fields and in philosophy (N = 580) and asked them to judge explanations for phenomena from those fields. Like the novices in Hopkins et al. (2016), scientists' ratings of bad explanations were influenced by reductive information when viewing phenomena from outside their field of expertise, but they were less likely to show this bias when reasoning about their own field. Higher levels of educational attainment did improve detection of bad explanations. These results indicate that advanced training in science or logic can lead to more accurate reasoning about explanations, but does not mitigate the reductive allure effect.