Seductive Allure Research Articles

The potential of neuroscience for health sciences education: towards convergence of evidence and resisting seductive allure.

Since emergence of the field ‘Educational Neuroscience’ (EN) in the late nineties of the previous century, a debate has emerged about the potential this field holds to influence teaching and learning in the classroom. By now, most agree that the original claims promising direct translations to teaching and learning were too strong. I argue here that research questions in (health professions) education require multi-methodological approaches, including neuroscience, while carefully weighing what (combination of) approaches are most suitable given a research question. Only through a multi-methodological approach will convergence of evidence emerge, which is so desperately needed for improving teaching and learning in the classroom. However, both researchers and teachers should become aware of the so-called ‘seductive allure’ of EN; that is, the demonstrable physical location and apparent objectivity of the measurements can be interpreted as yielding more powerful evidence and warranting stronger conclusions than, e.g., behavioral experiments, where in fact oftentimes the reverse is the case. I conclude that our tendency as researchers to commit ourselves to one methodological approach and to addressing educational research questions from a single methodological perspective is limiting progress in educational science and in translation to education.

The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information

Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information—even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of the explanations. This seductive allure effect was first demonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, and Gray (2008), and has since been replicated several times (Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian, & Hodges, 2015; Minahan & Siedlecki, 2016; Rhodes, Rodriguez, & Shah, 2014; Weisberg, Taylor, & Hopkins, 2015). However, these studies only examined psychological phenomena. The current study thus investigated the generality of this effect and found that it occurs across several scientific disciplines whenever the explanations include reductive information: reference to smaller components or more fundamental processes. These data suggest that people have a general preference for reductive information, even when it is irrelevant to the logic of an explanation.

Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations

AbstractPrevious work showed that people find explanations more satisfying when they contain irrelevant neuroscience information. The current studies investigate why this effect happens. In Study 1 (N=322), subjects judged psychology explanations that did or did not contain irrelevant neuroscience information. Longer explanations were judged more satisfying, as were explanations containing neuroscience information, but these two factors made independent contributions. In Study 2 (N=255), subjects directly compared good and bad explanations. Subjects were generally successful at selecting the good explanation except when the bad explanation contained neuroscience and the good one did not. Study 3 (N=159) tested whether neuroscience jargon was necessary for the effect, or whether it would obtain with any reference to the brain. Responses to these two conditions did not differ. These results confirm that neuroscience information exerts a seductive effect on people’s judgments, which may explain the appeal of neuroscience information within the public sphere.

Stimulus Set for 'The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations'

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. We tested this hypothesis by giving naive adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) × 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Look Again: Effects of Brain Images and Mind–Brain Dualism on Lay Evaluations of Research

Brain scans have frequently been credited with uniquely seductive and persuasive qualities, leading to claims that fMRI research receives a disproportionate share of public attention and funding. It has been suggested that functional brain images are fascinating because they contradict dualist beliefs regarding the relationship between the body and the mind. Although previous research has indicated that brain images can increase judgments of an article's scientific reasoning, the hypotheses that brain scans make research appear more interesting, surprising, or worthy of funding have not been tested. Neither has the relation between the allure of brain imaging and dualism. In the following three studies, laypersons rated both fictional research descriptions and real science news articles accompanied by brain scans, bar charts, or photographs. Across 988 participants, we found little evidence of neuroimaging's seductive allure or of its relation to self-professed dualistic beliefs. These results, taken together with other recent null findings, suggest that brain images are less powerful than has been argued.

The Seductive Allure of “Seductive Allure”

The idea of fMRI’s “seductive allure” is supported by two widely cited studies. Upon closer analysis of these studies, and in light of more recent research, we find little empirical support for the claim that brain images are inordinately influential.

Brain Branding: When Neuroscience and Commerce Collide

Products that align themselves with basic and clinical neurosciences do well in the market. There are reasons to be wary about such “brain branding” when commercial interests threaten to compromise scientific and clinical values. We describe three concerns. The first, exemplified in drug development and dissemination, is of the insidious effects of blurred boundaries between academia and industry. The second, exemplified by the sale of brain fitness products, is of commerce getting ahead of the motivating science. The third, exemplified by some functional imaging practices, is of the misuse of neuroscience in marketing technology. We propose three reasons for why brain branding appears to work. First is the seductive allure of neuroscience as providing seemingly deeper explanations of complex phenomena. The second is the persuasive power of pictures, which converges with the allure of neuroscience in brain imaging. The third is the context in which many physicians and patients find themselves. The relative lack of control over the course of chronic diseases may dispose physicians and patients to believe claims made by companies that align themselves with neuroscience. We outline circumstances when clinicians, patients, and consumers should question the usefulness of diagnostic tools and therapeutic interventions.

The Seductive Allure of ‘Best Practices’: Improved Outcome is a Delicate Dance between Structure and Process

In the drive to improve quality of care, a great deal of attention has been directed towards process improvement and identification and diffusion of best practices. An understanding of the history of best practice adoption in the manufacturing industry reveals its dependence upon the transfer of primarily explicit knowledge. When the task is highly context-dependent and involves tacit knowledge, the success drops. In healthcare, especially when dealing with complex problems and chronic disease, the intertwining of structure and process is necessary to produce positive outcomes. In such situations, best practices should serve as the starting point, not an end.

<i>Kumar Talkies</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Kumar Talkies Ashish Chadha (bio) Kumar Talkies (1998); DVD-R distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 2000 Kumar Talkies is a meandering documentary about the only cinema theater in Kalpi, a nondescript, inconsequential town in northern India. Kalpi lies at the forgotten margins of postcolonial India, away from the alluring metropolitan center of Indian cultural modernity. A medieval market town shorn of its premodern imminence and now a waylaid bazaar of local agrarian produce and minor industries, it is here that the rustic Indian masses that consume the affective sensorium of Hindi cinema toil and subsist. Kalpi’s historical self-imagination is represented by this popular cinema as the battlefield where the rebellious queen of Jhansi valiantly fought the British during India’s first war of independence in 1857. Immortalized in the popular Hindi film Jhansi Ki Rani (1952), Kalpi sits on the edge of the Chambal Valley, a site often featured in 1960s dacoit, or “bandit,” films. Cinema in Kalpi is a part of the everyday banality of discreet pleasure and wasted desire. Cinema is indispensable for Kalpi, but it [End Page 163] has an ambivalent relationship to its people, who watch it on cable in the privacy of their bedrooms or in the town’s only theater. Kumar Talkies is their only source of public entertainment. Audiences trot to this ramshackle theater three times a day to see soft porn movies or gratuitous B-grade Bollywood masala fare. Often abruptly interrupted by power outages or missing scenes, these fragments of discontinuous cinema are conspicuously consumed by the subaltern working class of Kalpi. Projecting scratched and faded celluloid through a rickety projector with screechy sound, Kumar Talkies is a family operation catering to the unfulfilled gratification of the town’s apathetic men folk. Director Pankaj Rishi Kumar enters this social sphere of debased pleasure and inconsequential propensity to document, almost with ethnographic acuity, the place of cinema in small-town India, far away from the glamorous enthrallment of Bombay into the dusty turgidity of northern India. Trained as an editor at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kumar began his career as an assistant editor on the celebrated film Bandit Queen (1994). Subsequently disillusioned with the mainstream Indian film industry, he made this 16mm documentary with his own money to fathom the seductive allure of the cinematic pleasures that had ensnared him. Kumar Talkies begins as a seemingly conventional documentary intervention to unobtrusively explore the role of cinema in a provincial, nonmetropolitan India, but slowly and unmindfully, the film descends into the domain of the personal. The decrepit, monkey-strutting, pigeon-infested theater was actually a gutted lentil mill that Kumar’s father inherited and, in 1969, transformed into a talkie. Kumar uses the theater as an emotional conduit to make forays into his own family history, both to examine his quirky love of cinema inherited from his father, a retired government official, and to explore the role of cinema in Kalpi during the emerging twenty-four-seven cable television onslaught of the late 1990s. Kumar adeptly excavates the pedestrian geography of his ancestral town to make a documentary that navigates his autobiography to tell a tale about cinema. In the film, his obsession with cinema, his father’s fetish with films, and Kalpi’s love for cinema all collapse into a single narrative that comments on the affective role of cinema in contemporary India. The family in Kumar Talkies provides the film with a personal locus around which the affective narrative of the documentary is woven. Kumar’s father had recently died, and Kumar uses the documentary as a memorial to his father’s fascination with cinema as well as to address his own susceptibility toward the medium. Kumar subtly ties his infective relationship to cinema as a filmmaker to the emotive bond that he shared with his father as the only one of three sons to choose cinema as a profession. The search for what cinema means to Kalpi’s inhabitants becomes a metaphor for Kumar’s own quest, mirrored in his delicate excavation of his deceased father’s eccentric obsession. The documentary is driven by a sense of poignancy—the story of a...

Complexity at large

Complexity at large

Steps towards a Critical Neuroscience

This paper introduces the motivation and idea behind the recently founded interdisciplinary initiative Critical Neuroscience (http://www.critical-neuroscience.org). Critical Neuroscience is an approach that strives to understand, explain, contextualize, and, where called for, critique developments in and around the social, affective, and cognitive neurosciences with the aim to create the competencies needed to responsibly deal with new challenges and concerns emerging in relation to the brain sciences. It addresses scholars in the humanities as well as, importantly, neuroscientific practitioners, policy makers, and the public at large. Does neuroscience indeed have such wide-ranging effects or are we collectively overestimating its impacts at the expense of other important drivers of social and cultural change? Via what channels is neuroscience interacting with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, identity, and well-being? Importantly, Critical Neuroscience strives to make the results of these assessments relevant to scientific practice itself. It aspires to motivate neuroscientists to be involved in the analysis of contextual factors, historical trajectories, conceptual difficulties, and potential consequences in connection to their empirical work. This paper begins to spell out a philosophical foundation for the project by outlining examples of the interaction taking place between the neurosciences and the social and cultural contexts in which they are embedded and by exposing some of the assumptions and argumentative patterns underlying dominant approaches. Recent anthropological work will be discussed to convey a sense of the de facto interactions between neuroscientific knowledge, its promissory projections, and the self-understandings of laypeople. This can be seen as a first step towards a phenomenology of the “seductive allure” that the neurosciences are exerting upon both the academic and the popular imagination. The concept of “critique” relevant to the project's overall orientation is outlined in the final section.

The Seductive Allure of Behavioral Epigenetics

Could chemical changes to DNA underlie some of society's more vexing problems? Or is this hot new field getting ahead of itself?

A Neuroskeptic's Guide to Neuroethics and National Security

This article—informed by science studies scholarship and consonant with the emerging enterprise of “critical neuroscience”—critiques recent neuroscience research, and its current and potential applications in the national security context. The author expresses concern about the subtle interplay between the national security and neuroscience communities, and the hazards of the mutual enchantment that may ensue. The Bush Administration's “war on terror” has provided numerous examples of the abuse of medicine, behavioral psychology, polygraphy, and satellite imagery. The defense and national security communities have an ongoing interest in neuroscience too—in particular, neuroimaging and psychoactive drugs (including oxytocin) as aids to interrogation. Given the seductive allure of neuroscientific explanations and colorful brain images, neuroscience in a national security context is particularly vulnerable to abuse. The author calls for an urgent reevaluation of national security neuroscience as part of a broader public discussion about neuroscience's nontherapeutic goals.

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

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. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Methodical Worlds: Partition, Secularism, and Communalism in India

Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, was the bastard offspring of a one-shot encounter between a departing Britisher, William Methwold (last of a line of angrezi robber barons), and Vanita, wife of a poor Maharashtrian accordionist--a proletarian Mumbaikar given to singing maudlin Broadway hits in the homes of the rich to earn his supper. seductive allure of Methwold rose largely from the clean-cut parting that ran through the middle of his brilliantined hair. Hypnotized by its clarity and metric precision, Vanita, like many another Indian in Methwold's circle, succumbed to his charm. As the sun set on August 14, 1947, over Methwold's estate on Malabar Hills, Bombay, and Vanita went into an excruciating labor that would produce Saleem Sinai/Modern India but that she herself would not survive, Methwold stood in the center of the courtyard and his long tapering white fingers twitched towards centre-parting, and the . . . secret was revealed, because fingers curled, an d seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand. (1) Rushdie may be read as suggesting that the whole enterprise of British colonialism in India was, ultimately, a con job--in the real sense that it was a confidence trick resting as much on the willingness to believe deeply on the side of the duped as it did on the machinations of the trickster. Just as the clarity and precision of Methwold's parting proved illusory, the methodical world that was to arise from the Indian subcontinent's entry into postcolonial modernity has turned out to be a promise belied, full of false solutions and con jobs, most propelled by a desire for neat and precise solutions to the vexing, but ultimately unresolvable, problem of human difference. Rushdie may also be read as suggesting that the business of nation building is the endless effort to colonize all forms of belonging into conformity with a simulacrum called the nation, an idealized copy based on an original that does not exist anywhere. Ultimately, the seduction of Partition lay in the belief entertained by many in the sub continent that the enormity of this rupture may bring us into conformity with an ideal and normalized original called the nation that exists ever elsewhere--an elsewhere whose coordinates can never be precisely established because it is more a statement of desire than of reality. In this article, I engage in a series of ruminations that seek to dislodge the solidity of mainstream narratives about partition in South Asia. My reasons for doing so stem from a realization that mainstream narratives have energized and sustained the animosity and violence between communities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and are, even as I write this, preparing the ground for yet another war fought by antagonists convinced of the historical and ethical correctness of their actions and choices. There is something about the ways in which history has been narrated in South Asia that has corralled our entire future into a box labeled The Unfinished Business of Partition, and this article is an effort to escape its confines. Displacing the Assumed Singularity of Partition In an influential essay written a decade ago now, Gyanendra Pandey noted the assiduousness and energy with which Partition was not talked about in mainstream histories of the subcontinent. It is variously elided as the price to pay for national independence, as an irrational and inexplicable event remarkable for its suddenness, naturalized by metaphors that removed it from the realm of human agency and seen as an aberration in the story of the coming-to-being of an immanent destiny called India. In all these ways the actual details of the events themselves have escaped sustained or frontal attention. …

Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste

My topic, broadly speaking, is the aesthetics of exoticism. What are the origins and cultural significance of that seductive allure we identify with aestheticized emblems of otherness? How can their uncontested appeal in the modern world be understood from the complementary vantage points of consumer culture and the philosophy of art? There are few richer contexts within which to explore these questions than early eighteenth-century Britain. The period once known best for the stately couplets of Augustan poetry has received attention more recently as the site of the origins of modern aesthetic theory, the birth of the consumer society, and the consolidation of nationalist pride in the cornucopia of exotic commodities procured through a rapidly expanding overseas trade.1 The pervasive cultural motifs reflected in morally fraught debates over standards of taste, changing patterns of consumption, and the social effects of luxury coalesce in the period's pronounced and deeply ambivalent fascination with that style in the decorative arts known as chinoiserie.2

Defining Experience: The "Poems of Seductive Allure" (Yanshi) of the Mid-Tang Poet Yuan Zhen (779-831)

Yuan Zhen's poems of seductive allure (yanshi), or what remains of them, point to a new interest in romantic subject matter in the mid-Tang. But unlike other writers of his era, Yuan Zhen attempted to integrate his romantic poems into his corpus by defending them as didactic pieces-poems that could stimulate moral reform by their negative example. This article examines the specific literary and historical contexts for Yuan Zhen's unusual defense of romantic verse. It argues that Yuan's efforts to include his romantic poetry in a broad schema of literature were consistent with many of his other statements on the nature and purpose of literature. Furthermore, although Yuan was unique in his defense of romance, his challenge to the traditional boundaries of literati writing link him to other mid-Tang writers who were also contesting inherited definitions of more appropriate topics and texts.