![]() ![]() ![]() A long tradition in philosophy has studied scientific explanations in general, proposing frameworks for deciding which explanations are true and what form such explanations should take (e.g., Garfinkel, 1981 Hempel & Oppenheim, 1948 Strevens, 2008). It is human nature to seek out explanations for phenomena in the natural world, and one of the main goals of the modern practice of science is to construct such explanations. These results have implications for how members of the public understand neuroscience information, especially in cases where dualist tendencies may encourage people to think about individuals as being separate from their brain processes (e.g., the law, clinical psychology, and psychiatry). However, people were somewhat more likely to reduce psychology to neuroscience and also selected significantly more methods as being useful for explaining neuroscience phenomena. We found that participants generally preferred methods that either matched the field of investigation (e.g., biology for biology) or that came from the immediately more reductive field (e.g., chemistry for biology). To do so, we asked participants to choose which methods would be most appropriate for investigating topics in six scientific fields. The study reported in this paper investigates whether this preference for reductive explanations is particularly strong for psychology, whether it leads participants to preferentially seek out neuroscience explanations, and whether this preference leads participants to be drawn to explanations from the immediately reductive level (e.g., biology for neuroscience) rather than from more reductive fields (e.g., physics for neuroscience). One possible reason for why this might happen is that people have a general preference for explanations that include language from more fundamental fields (reductive explanations), and psychology can be seen as reducing to neuroscience. People tend to think that explanations of psychological phenomena are better when those explanations contain neuroscience information, even when that information is irrelevant to the logic of the explanation. These results suggest that people’s sense of the relations among scientific fields are fairly well calibrated but display some general attraction to neuroscience. ![]() Additionally, participants selected significantly more methods as being useful for explaining neuroscience phenomena. Both of these patterns were especially evident for the pairing of psychology and neuroscience. Participants generally preferred methods that either matched the field of investigation (e.g., biology for biology) or that came from the immediately more reductive field (e.g., chemistry for biology). The current study asked 82 participants to choose which methods would be most appropriate for investigating topics in six scientific fields. This preference may be due to a general preference for reductive explanations however, prior work has not investigated whether people indeed prefer such explanations or whether this preference varies by scientific discipline. Previous work has found that people are drawn to explanations of psychological phenomena when these explanations contain neuroscience information, even when that information is irrelevant. ![]()
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