# Replicating the 'Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations' Effect

*Väth, von Petersdorff, Neumann, Mundry & Fischer · Critique & Boundary, Measurement & Method · Royal Society Open Science · 2024 · Open access*

Väth and colleagues put a famous finding to the test. The original seductive-allure-of-neuroscience-explanations effect (Weisberg and colleagues, 2008) reported that adding irrelevant neuroscience information to an explanation makes people rate the explanation as better, as if a dusting of brain-talk lent an argument authority it had not earned. That result became a favourite citation for anyone warning that scientific-sounding trappings can smuggle in unwarranted credibility. This preregistered study sets out to replicate it, in a classroom exercise and then in a larger online experiment (n = 430) spanning different levels of expertise, and finds the effect much weaker than advertised: across expertise levels people rated good explanations more favourably than bad ones whether or not superfluous neuroscience was present, and where the neuroscience did nudge judgements the differences were surprisingly small and the variation high. In other words the seductive allure is real-ish but modest, and people are better at telling good explanations from bad than the original scare suggested. For a corpus that is sceptical of the science-washing of psychological safety, this paper is a double-edged and therefore useful citation: it names the genuine phenomenon (that neuroscience framing, brain images and the language of the amygdala can lend a claim a false glow of rigour, which is exactly how a lot of popular psychological-safety writing borrows authority) while also modelling the correction, since the tidy original finding did not fully hold up either. The lesson it leaves is even-handed scepticism, of the sciencey gloss and of the neat result alike. Its limits are those of a single replication in a specific population: it refines an effect size rather than settling the question, and its stimuli are general explanations rather than anything drawn from organisational life. (Text drawn from the 2024 Royal Society Open Science paper, 11(12), article 241120.)

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