There's an interesting article at Seed right now, which claims that neuroscience-y jargon and functional MRI images are unduly important in academic psychology. The reasoning, and the evidence, are as follows:

Probably because fMRI seems more like real science than many of the other things that psychologists are up to. It has all the trappings of work with great lab-cred: big, expensive, and potentially dangerous machines, hospitals and medical centers, and a lot of people in white coats. In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.

Unfortunately, I can't find any of the details of this study on-line. Searching for the name Deena Skolnick returns little more than an unrelated paper, (co-authored, by the way, by the authoer of the Seed piece).

(Via Language Log.)

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