Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work has found that people feel significantly moresatisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena whenthose explanations contain neuroscience information — evenwhen this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of theexplanations. This seductive allure effect was firstdemonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray(2008), and has since been replicated several times inindependent labs (e.g., Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian, &Hodges, 2014; Rhodes, Rodriguez, & Shah, 2014; Weisberg,Taylor, & Hopkins, 2015). However, these studies onlyexamined psychological explanations with addedneuroscience information. The current study thus investigatedthe generality of this effect and found that the seductive allureeffect occurs across several scientific disciplines wheneverthe explanations include reference to smaller components ormore fundamental processes. These data suggest that peoplehave a general preference for reductive explanations.