In my last post, when discussing some research by Singer et al (2006), I mentioned as an aside that their use of fMRI data didn’t seem to add a whole lot to their experiment. Yes, they found that brain regions associated with empathy appear to be less active in men watching a confederate who behaved unfairly towards them receive pain; they also found that areas associated with reward seemed slightly more active. Neat; but what did that add beyond what a pencil and paper or behavioral measure might?
It means you don’t have to rely on the honesty of their self reporting, which is pretty important since human self-analysis is frankly pretty shitty, and it doesn’t take much to persuade them to lie.
To use an example from this book which I recently finished reading, one experiment tested whether people who were allowed to electronically view an art display rated paintings higher when they had marks showing they were owned by a gallery which they were told had sponsored their viewing experience. They did, and they disavowed the sponsorship having anything to do with their ratings. The researchers could have concluded from this that the subjects viewed the paintings more favorably out of an unconscious sense of reciprocity, but that would have been pretty lousy science, because they could easily have been lying and acting on conscious reciprocity and then denying it, as social niceties demand that they do. They did the experiment with brain scans and confirmed that the subjects’ pleasure centers showed more activity for the paintings associated with the sponsor gallery. Had they not, we could infer that they were acting out of conscious reciprocity.
Another route might be to suggest that our knowledge of what areas of the brain are associated with empathy and pleasure is somehow off: maybe increased activation means less empathy, or maybe empathy is processed elsewhere in the brain, or some other cognitive process is interfering. Hell; maybe it’s possible that the technology employed by fMRIs just isn’t sensitive to what you’re trying to look at. Though the brain scan might have highlighted our ignorance as to how the brain is working in that case, it didn’t help us to resolve it.
Knowing that your model has flaws is a necessary step to correcting it. If a research tool gives you information you wouldn’t otherwise have had, it’s done you a valuable service, even if it doesn’t by itself provide sufficient information to build you a new model.
A whole lot of psychology’s poor reputation as a field relative to harder sciences like physics or chemistry comes from overinterpretation of open-ended results like surveys or behavioral studies, where the observations could be explained under multiple models. Brain scanning and other neuroscientific research options provide a useful mechanism for distinguishing between models and helping to avoid that half-assed state.
If we stalled physics research when we reached a point where we couldn’t distinguish between hypotheses easily and cheaply, we wouldn’t know that much about physics today.
Entirely agreed. Even if you more often than not get the same answers from fMRI and surveys, the fMRI externalizes the judgment of whether or not someone is empathizing/emotional/cognitive stating with regards to something else.
One might argue that we probably have a decent understanding of how well people’s verbal statements line up with different facts, but where this diverges from the neurological reality is interesting enough to be spending money on the chance of finding the discrepancies. If we don’t find them, that’s also fascinating, and is worth knowing about.
Taking for granted that what people say about themselves is accurate, but externalized measurement is also worthwhile for it’s own sake.
It means you don’t have to rely on the honesty of their self reporting, which is pretty important since human self-analysis is frankly pretty shitty, and it doesn’t take much to persuade them to lie.
To use an example from this book which I recently finished reading, one experiment tested whether people who were allowed to electronically view an art display rated paintings higher when they had marks showing they were owned by a gallery which they were told had sponsored their viewing experience. They did, and they disavowed the sponsorship having anything to do with their ratings. The researchers could have concluded from this that the subjects viewed the paintings more favorably out of an unconscious sense of reciprocity, but that would have been pretty lousy science, because they could easily have been lying and acting on conscious reciprocity and then denying it, as social niceties demand that they do. They did the experiment with brain scans and confirmed that the subjects’ pleasure centers showed more activity for the paintings associated with the sponsor gallery. Had they not, we could infer that they were acting out of conscious reciprocity.
Knowing that your model has flaws is a necessary step to correcting it. If a research tool gives you information you wouldn’t otherwise have had, it’s done you a valuable service, even if it doesn’t by itself provide sufficient information to build you a new model.
A whole lot of psychology’s poor reputation as a field relative to harder sciences like physics or chemistry comes from overinterpretation of open-ended results like surveys or behavioral studies, where the observations could be explained under multiple models. Brain scanning and other neuroscientific research options provide a useful mechanism for distinguishing between models and helping to avoid that half-assed state.
If we stalled physics research when we reached a point where we couldn’t distinguish between hypotheses easily and cheaply, we wouldn’t know that much about physics today.
Entirely agreed. Even if you more often than not get the same answers from fMRI and surveys, the fMRI externalizes the judgment of whether or not someone is empathizing/emotional/cognitive stating with regards to something else.
One might argue that we probably have a decent understanding of how well people’s verbal statements line up with different facts, but where this diverges from the neurological reality is interesting enough to be spending money on the chance of finding the discrepancies. If we don’t find them, that’s also fascinating, and is worth knowing about.
Taking for granted that what people say about themselves is accurate, but externalized measurement is also worthwhile for it’s own sake.