Hi, Roger,
Thanks for this. Back in the good old days, when I was employed, I interacted a lot with qualitative psychologists and we argued about the probative value of illustrations and anecdotes. Their strong points were that illustrations allowed one to say that at least that happened once and that anecdotes, or stories about individual events of the life of single persons, at least allowed one to see the whole of something, even if for a brief second. Experiments, however, with statistics dissect causes in way that is entirely foreign to reality. So what is the probative value of a picture of a brain scan? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Friday, August 12, 2016 9:05 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: [FRIAM] credibility by association >From Science 12 Aug 2016:: A decade ago, it seemed as though every other neuroscience paper in high-profile journals featured multiple multicolored images of brain scans. In some cases, readers—many of whom were psychologists who had written papers on the same topic—pointed out that the pictographic scans added little explanatory power. Hopkins et al. have extended an earlier study of the relative impact of psychology and neuroscience to encompass both more reductive disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, and less reductive disciplines, such as social science. They find that study subjects judge scientific explanations to be of higher quality when they contain information from the neighboring more reductive field, even when that information is irrelevant. Cognition 155, 67 (2016). -- rec --
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