Demonstrating that there was at least one time when psychologists thought that illustrations and anecdotes had probative value.
On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 9:22 PM Nick Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 -- > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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