TY - GEN
T1 - Because the Brain Agrees
T2 - 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
AU - Plunkett, Dillon
AU - Lombrozo, Tania
AU - Buchak, Lara
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014. All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Three experiments investigate whether neuroscientific explanations for belief in some proposition (e.g., that God exists) are judged to reinforce, undermine, or have no effect on confidence that the corresponding proposition is true. Participants learned that an individual's religious, moral, or scientific belief activated a (fictional) brain region and indicated how this information would and should influence the individual's confidence. When the region was associated with true or false beliefs (Experiment 1), the predicted and endorsed responses were an increase or decrease in confidence, respectively. However, we found that epistemically-neutral but “normal” neural function was taken to reinforce belief, and “abnormal” function to have no effect or to undermine it, whether the (ab)normality was explicitly stated (Experiment 2) or implied (Experiment 3), suggesting that proper functioning is treated as a proxy for epistemic reliability. These findings have implications for science communication, philosophy, and our understanding of belief revision and folk epistemology.
AB - Three experiments investigate whether neuroscientific explanations for belief in some proposition (e.g., that God exists) are judged to reinforce, undermine, or have no effect on confidence that the corresponding proposition is true. Participants learned that an individual's religious, moral, or scientific belief activated a (fictional) brain region and indicated how this information would and should influence the individual's confidence. When the region was associated with true or false beliefs (Experiment 1), the predicted and endorsed responses were an increase or decrease in confidence, respectively. However, we found that epistemically-neutral but “normal” neural function was taken to reinforce belief, and “abnormal” function to have no effect or to undermine it, whether the (ab)normality was explicitly stated (Experiment 2) or implied (Experiment 3), suggesting that proper functioning is treated as a proxy for epistemic reliability. These findings have implications for science communication, philosophy, and our understanding of belief revision and folk epistemology.
KW - Neuroscience explanations
KW - belief debunking
KW - intuitive epistemology
KW - scientific communication
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85040731431&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85040731431&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85040731431
T3 - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
SP - 1180
EP - 1185
BT - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
Y2 - 23 July 2014 through 26 July 2014
ER -