In yet another news article on yet another of-questionable-value fMRI study, hard-hitting Discovery news came up with this doozy of a headline:
How Visiting Your Family Warps Your Brain
Really now? Warps your brain? Wow, I can’t wait to read how someone who visits their family actually finds significant, long-lasting structural changes in their brain.
Ahh, but then I’d be disappointed, because the “news” article only describes a study where subjects lay down on their backs, are inserted into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and shown various photos while researchers monitor the subject’s brain activity.
That’s a far cry from showing something is “warping” our brains.
These studies, while having some minimal informational value, are called analogue studies, because they aren’t actually measuring the real process that happens in everyday life. You can’t very well ask a subject to bring a dozen of his friends and family into the research lab and then measure an actual response. Instead, you have to display a photo to the person, while they’re strapped into an fMRI machine.
So what were the real findings behind the ridiculous headline?
The scientists found that relatives and self-lookalikes are processed through a self-referential part of the brain. Friends and strangers who look nothing like the viewer, on the other hand, light up entirely different areas of the brain, those linked to making important and risky decisions with respect to the self.
Ahh, so that’s it. Family lights up one side of our brain, and friends — who, interestingly enough, are found to be no different than strangers in our brain’s world — light up another side.
But, as the researchers note, this finding could also be explained by previous research that showed people perceive people as more friendly the more they look like us. So that would include our family and relatives, but not most of our friends. So rather than some genetic issue at work here, it may be simply one of evolutionary design — people who look like us are less likely to be our foes.
All of which is arm-chair intellectually interesting, but not at all in the same vein as having our brains “warped.”
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Bad Science Headlines: Discovery’s Brain Warping - World of Psychology | creditdocumentation.com (12/31/2008)
10 Comments to
“Bad Science Headlines: Discovery’s Brain Warping”
Dr. Grohol,
Thank you for continuing to post these interesting and thought provoking articles.
Do you think some scientists are trying to get publicity by putting out bad science? Or, are they victims of media sesationalism?
How do we get back to better science?
By the way, I just heard a talker on the radio say that teens who skip breakfast lose their virginity at a younger age. My first thought was the effect that news would have on the sale of breakfast foods across these here United States! What?
Keep up the great work!
and
Happy New Year!
Speaking of science…I would recommend a good book called: The Dilemma of Psychology: A psychologist look at his troubled profession by LeShan. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to purchase it from a bookseller like Barnes and Noble or Borders. But you can purchase it from AllWorth http://www.allworth.com/The_Dilemma_of_Psychology_p/1-58115-251-5.htm or request it from your local library.
LeShan speaks of science and the “dilemma” of science. Great book!
@Gerard - I think that in our increasingly short-attention-span driven world, sexy headlines grab the most attention, even if they bear little resemblance to the actual research. This headline was written by the folks at Discovery, ostensibly a company that knows a thing or two about science and objectivity. But sexy sells, as they say, and this headline makes it a far sexier story than what it actually is.
I think many researchers have long been pushing the boundaries between what their study and data actually show, and what they purport it shows. I find many researchers over-reach in their conclusions and in the discussion section, and ultimately I hold journal editors and reviewers for allowing such conclusions to be published without toning them down first to match the actual data.
High quality research used to be guaranteed by the name of the journal you were reading. No more. I now can find poor quality research in even the most respected journals. It’s a race to the mean, since high quality research takes a long time to conduct, analyze, write-up and get published. Much easier to publish something just “good enough,” and then connect the dots to suggest it shows more than it does.
Interestingly, it is not the function of a titel to accurately cover the contents of the article. It’s only function is to urge a potential reader to read on.
Really? I think many journalists and editors would disagree.
I agree with Dr. Grohol. The title is relevant to its content so what’s with the dispute? Anyway, thanks for sharing your insight on this one Dr. Grohol. I’ve been browsing for articles on depression and I stumbled upon your blogs. Happy Holidays!
@ Grohol: I understand you would think this way. It’s a frequent item of discussion between nitpicking scientists (and other bookkeepers) and professional writers (journalists, editors). I know, because I have been working as an editor for the past five years. It is also what is being tought at my university. So I would say you are wrong in assuming most journalists and editors would disagree. Perhaps in the field of scientific writing - yes, accuracy prevails over readability. But for the moast part, journalists and editors tend to choose phrasing that triggers attention, especially concerning titles. Ask yourself this question: what good is a text if it has no readers?
There’s nothing wrong with being a little bit creative or absolute when writing a headline, but in general news journalism and in science writing, you will find the vast majority of headlines actually portray rather accurately the content of the news story.
This one was simply not only off-base, it had little to do with the scientific findings of the researchers. The researchers did not study people who visited their family, and the researchers did not find that what they did study “warped” anyone’s brain.
If you’re an advocate for headlines that lie, it might as well have read “Santa Claus Prefers Eating Children, Not Cookies.” That headline would have been just as accurate.
Well, I’m not shure if the headline you propose is as accurate as the one thought up by Discovery… But I do know that the disappointment you felt when discovering the article wasn’t what you had expected it to be, resembles my feelings when reading the article above.
I was expecting some grossly and hideously flawed newsitem, but in fact it was not. The only thing considered wrong here is the word ‘warp’ in the title, which is hardly worth losing any sleep over. I wouldn’t go so far as to consider this lying. Popularizing, perhaps poorly choosen - yes. But that’s to be expected from a populair scientific website serving a large unscientific target group. Besides, it’s what titles do: they trigger your attention in order to make you read more. Which you obviously did.
So, maybe the scientific research was flawed, but we can’t really shoot the messenger for that, can we?
Why many journalist and editiors will disagree?
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 30 Dec 2008
