Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

If you’re an old guy or just a fanatic who reads everything including those pillow tags, you probably ping on the word, Homunculus.  If not, let a picture speak its thousand words.

Yeah, the little human in your head that controls everything.  Everyone says they don’t believe there’s a little person inside everyone’s brain that is the ultimate source of consciousness and action.  That’s just ridiculous.  But if you look around the persuasion landscape, you recognize the unmistakable signs of that Laughable Metaphor lurking behind the smart explanations of human thought and action.

Recently a bright fellow looked at all those silly people who engage in apocalyptic prediction only to find inevitable disconfirmation.  The writer asks,

Why are such apocalyptic prophecies so common in human history? What are their emotional and cognitive underpinnings?

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing in a thoughtful turn of mental pipe twisting, he answers his question.

Cognitively, there are several other processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains have evolved to be pattern-seeking belief engines. Imagine yourself as a hominid on the plains of Africa three million years ago. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a dangerous predator?

There is no compelling physical evidence that human brains evolved like this although it is not unbelievable.  And since the explanation can be neither proven nor refuted, it is little more than the Homunculus, but dressed up in the mechanical mysteries of evolution.

Another writer uses evolution as the Homunculus to explain the biology of morality.  Our values are in our genes.  The writer uses the example of Osama bin Laden.

It’s presumably neither ethical nor practical, but supposing that somebody could sequence Osama bin Laden’s genome, which genes would you want to examine to try to understand his violent desires?  I put this question to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of a new book called “The Science of Evil” (and a cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen). He replied that there is no evidence that bin Laden’s crimes came from his nature, rather than from his experiences, so you might find nothing.  But, Prof. Baron-Cohen went on, it would at least be interesting to take a look at bin Laden’s MAOA gene (linked to aggression), his AVPR1A and CNR1 genes (linked to emotional expression) and his CYP11B1, NTRK1, and GABRB3 genes, which show some association with how individuals score on a scale called the “Empathy Quotient.”

Again there’s no good physical evidence that evolution has anything or everything to do with this, but once again since the hypothesis can be neither proven or refuted, it is another kind of Homunculus, a little invisible thing within us that makes us just so.  Instead of the little human, you substitute MAOA or AVPR1A (kinda sound like hip new websites, don’t they?).

You also see the Homunculus 2.0 in those marvelous brain pictures that accompany the latest and greatest neuroscience.  Consider.  McCabe and Castel ran three experiments with college adults – presumably pretty sharp thinkers compared to free range folks living without the benefit of the U – that provided research reports varying on the pretty pictures.  Half the time the pretty picture was just quantitative while the other half of the time the pretty picture was a pretty picture of a brain.  Like this.

McCabe and Casteel created fictitious and scientifically questionable results in experiments about the relationship between brain activity and watching TV.  Like this:

For example, in the article entitled, “Watching TV is Related to Math Ability,” it was concluded that because watching television and completing arithmetic problems both led to activation in the temporal lobe, watching television improved math skills. This similarity in activation was depicted in a bar graph or brain image (shown in Fig. 1a), or was only explained in the text (the control condition).

In ELM terms, everyone reads weak Arguments (spurious claims, dubious data) that should generate negative elaborations in that Long Conversation in the Head.  These weak Arguments are accompanied by different kinds of pretty pictures which are available as simple Cues.  And, there’s a No Picture Control so we see what happens when there are no pictures.  So, how goes the results?

Planned comparisons revealed that both the brain image (M = 2.92, SEM = .04) and bar graph (M = 2.90, SEM = .04) conditions were rated as better written than the control condition (M = 2.77, SEM = .05), F(1, 155) = 5.82, MSE = 1.82; F(1,155) = 3.92, MSE = 1.28, respectively. Critically, as shown in Fig. 1b, texts accompanied by a brain image were given the highest ratings of scientific reasoning, differing reliably from both the control, F(1, 155) = 5.87, MSE = 1.70, and bar graph conditions, F(1, 155) = 8.38, MSE = 1.85.

Those F-ratio statistics translate into Small Plus Windowpanes, so the effect is right on the edge of apparent to the naked eye.  The researchers replicate the study, this time with a comparison between these two pretty pictures of the brain.

The one on the right is the familiar pretty picture of a brain while the one on the left is a topological map which provides the same information, just in a way that only makes sense to a scientist.  Again, these images accompany a report of a bad experiment on TV watching and math ability.  This time, McCabe and Castel find a Small Windowpane difference.  College student rate the bad report as better with the familiar brain pretty picture.

McCabe and Castel replicate this effect one more time on the topic of using brain scans to detect criminals, and again find the pretty picture brain image leads people to rate the bad science as better.

And just to be the Annoying Professor here, this effect has been replicated by other researchers.  Weiberg et al. produce the same finding in their well titled paper, The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations.  Add a pretty picture to poor science and you get Homunculus 2.0 in operation.  And, Diane Beck provides a nice overview of these kind of failures reported in the New York Times, demonstrating that you don’t need a randomized controlled trial to illustrate the new Homunculus.  And, (and this is the last And here), we can return to George Miller and his warnings about bad science with the brain among – Scientists!

Please see the metaphor here.  No one uses the word Homunculus nowadays, although it would be a helluva name for an Eminor Whiner band.  Yet, many people still believe in the concept behind the label.  There something in there that is driving us.  Evolution shaping our brains.  MAOA genes shaping our brains.  And, those pretty pictures reveal it all.  But, when you think about it, none of these things are proven or explanatory.  At best they only correlate with thought and action.

See now the Persuasion Play here.  As I’ve noted before, you’ll learn nothing new about persuasion from fMRI pictures, but you can make people think they are seeing the Real Thing with those pictures.  Hire somebody with a brain scanner and get some of those pretty pictures.  Put them in your corporate annual report or your marketing study for the Head Shed or in your promotional materials selling your services.  People will reliably fall for it.  The Rules!

All Bad Science Is Persuasive.  You Cannot Persuade A Falling Apple.  You Should Not Try To Persuade A Falling Apple.

Too, and most importantly:  It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.  And if Other Guys are falling for pretty pictures then buy that camera and learn how to use it!

P.S.  Read more about it with these sources.

Beck, Diane M. The appeal of the brain in the popular press.
Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol 5(6), Dec 2010, 762-766.
doi: 10.1177/1745691610388779

McCabe, David P.; Castel, Alan D. Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning.
Cognition, Vol 107(1), Apr 2008, 343-352.
doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.017

Weisberg, Deena Skolnick; Keil, Frank C.; Goodstein, Joshua; Rawson, Elizabeth; Gray, Jeremy R.
The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol 20(3), Mar 2008, 470-477.
doi: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20040