If you watch or read much science fiction, you know that all it takes to suspend disbelief about fictional science is an explanation that sounds good on the surface and makes use of terms and ideas that your audience doesn’t fully understand but does find emotionally compelling. It’s why “radioactive spider” made sense in 1960s.
Apparently (and unfortunately) this effect is true for actual science as well.
This slide comes from a lecture given by Oxford University neuroscientist Dorothy Bishop. Basically, it’s showing that an explanation of a psychological phenomenon became more believable if you added in some hand-wavey neuroscience and pictures of brain scans. Suddenly, an explanation of human behavior that’s based on circular reasoning and poor logic changes from something lay people won’t accept to something we’re happy to buy into.
Bishop’s entire, hour-long presentation on the science of bad neuroscience is available to watch online for free. If you don’t have time, check out this summary of the key points at the Neurobonkers blog.
Via Mind Hacks