Some call it "alcoholism," my cousins call it Lithaunian nationalism.

Does any other nation dare to drink like the British?

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.)