Uncertainty promotes neuroreductionism: A behavioral online study on folk psychological causal inference from neuroimaging data

TL;DR

This study examines how highly educated individuals tend to favor neuroreductionist explanations for mental disorders, especially under causal uncertainty, highlighting the influence of context on causal attribution in neuroimaging data.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on context-dependent causal attributions and reveals a bias towards brain-to-mind causality in folk psychology, especially for newly classified disorders like BID.

Findings

Participants showed context-dependent causality attributions.

A bias towards brain-to-mind causality was observed for BID.

Unjustified neuroreductionist inclinations are prevalent under causal uncertainty.

Abstract

Introduction. Increased efforts in neuroscience try to understand mental disorders as brain disorders. In the present study we investigate how common a neuroreductionist inclination is among highly educated people. In particular, we shed light on implicit presuppositions of mental disorders little is known about in the public, exemplified here by the case of Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) that is considered a mental disorder for the first time in ICD-11. Methods. Identically graphed, simulated data of mind-brain correlations were shown in three contexts with presumably different presumptions about causality. 738 highly-educated laymen rated plausibility of causality attribution from brain to mind and from mind to brain for correlations between brain structural properties and mental phenomena. We contrasted participants' plausibility ratings of causality in the contexts of commonly perceived brain-lesion induced behavior (aphasia), behavior-induced training effects (piano playing), and a newly described mental disorder (BID). Results. The findings reveal the expected context-dependent modulation of causality attributions in the contexts of aphasia and piano playing. Furthermore, we observed a significant tendency to more readily attribute causal inference from brain to mind than vice versa with respect to BID. Conclusion. In some contexts, exemplified here by aphasia and piano playing, unidirectional causality attributions may be justified. However, with respect to BID, we critically discuss presumably unjustified neuroreductionist inclinations under causal uncertainty. Finally, we emphasize the need for a presupposition-free approach in psychiatry.