The SANE Effect

The SANE Effect

Spend any time on LinkedIn or other social media, and you may well come across posts and articles mentioning neuroscience or brain science, using neuro- as a prefix to invent terms like “neuroleadership”, or including images of brain scans or brain waves. If you google “the neuroscience of leadership”, you’ll find myriad articles, training courses and certifications, and images of glowing brains and neurons firing.

There’s an interesting reason for this: using neuroscience terms and imagery means people are more likely to believe the claims made, even if they’re false. Neuroscience seems clever, mysterious, advanced, intellectual, and objective, whilst sociology and psychology may be seen as more woolly, or at least less backed by “robust”, empirical evidence like brain scans.

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

Some of this neuroscience work is thoughtful, robust, and genuinely illuminating. But some of it, frankly, is entirely made up. And it’s often very hard to tell the two apart.

“It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong.”
Terry Pratchett

Our human fascination with the brain is powerful and universal. Neuroscience carries enormous epistemic authority. That authority is well earned, but it is also far too easily borrowed.

There’s a name for this. It’s called the SANE effect: the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations, and was coined in a 2008 paper by Deena Weisberg and others in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Explanations of psychological phenomena appear more credible when they contain neuroscientific-sounding information. Even completely irrelevant neuroscience information appears to interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the claims being made. Worryingly, the added neuroscience had a particularly strong effect on bad explanations, masking issues with claims that would otherwise have been obviously false.

And the SANE effect is not just an effect on laypeople – students of neuroscience showed the same biases. Only true experts – people with deep experience and expertise in the field – were largely (but still not always) immune.

This excellent piece on the SANE effect by Christian Jarrett shows that there’s, understandably, depth and nuance to it. Some replications of the Weisberg studies show strong effects, and others weaker ones. Other factors such as longer explanations, visual richness, writing style, and extra detail can all affect perceived credibility, regardless of the actual content. And this points to the underlying mechanism of the bias, because the SANE effect is a natural heuristic; i.e. we rarely have the time or expertise to evaluate claims based purely on their logic and evidence, so instead we rely on cues and shortcuts like technical language, imagery, and reference to fields and mechanisms that sound more objective and robust. We often find explanations satisfying because they look and sound right, not because they are structurally robust.

The Reverse SANE Effect

The issue of course is not that neuroscience-related claims are always wrong, it’s that the presence of neuroscience words and images can make explanations feel more scientific, more authoritative, and more convincing than they actually are. Neuroscience is frequently co-opted to establish unwarranted credibility for the claims being made. 

In itself this can backfire – as a result of the massive misuse and co-opting of neuroscience, I’d like to suggest the “Reverse-SANE Effect”, where it works the other way around, and mentioning neuroscience actually reduces the perceived credibility of a claim. I often find myself intuitively dismissing claims precisely because they mention neuroscience or have an image of a brain scan attached. I’m aware that this isn’t useful, or fair, but it’s a result of the overwhelming deluge of neuroscience-associated claims, and it’s something I try to recognise when I’m doing it. 

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell

Language Complexity

One of the mechanisms behind the SANE effect is language, but it’s not that clear-cut. In a beautifully titled paper from 2006: “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly.”, Daniel Oppenheimer explored what happens when writers use overly complex language to sound more intelligent. The prevailing belief among students was that bigger words make you look smarter, but they were wrong. Across multiple experiments, essays rewritten with more complex vocabulary were consistently judged as coming from less intelligent authors. 

Oppenheimer (not that one) used the term “processing fluency” to describe how when something is harder to process, we tend to evaluate it more negatively. “Needless complexity leads to negative evaluations.” So – if we write as clearly and simply as we can, we’ll be more likely to be thought of as intelligent.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
― Daniel Kahneman

So, alongside the SANE effect, a fascinating tension appears – complex language can make writing feel less intelligent, whilst scientific-sounding detail can make explanations feel more convincing. Whilst it seems paradoxical, it isn’t: in both cases, we’re not judging the idea itself – we’re judging signals. When an explanation is sprinkled with technical terminology, references to neuro-things, brain systems, or claims of biological grounding (or even “quantum” on occasion – yes, there’s even “quantum leadership”), it invokes expert power and signals academic authority. It also, importantly, raises the perceived cost of disagreement – often on purpose. It’s psychologically harder to disagree with a claim made using complex, neurosciency terminology, especially when we’re not experts in neuroscience.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard Feynman

SANE and Psychological Safety

Interestingly, whilst there have been claims that psychological safety itself is a “SANE Effect” term, it doesn’t appear to be the case, at least not measurably so. The effect isn’t triggered by the word “psychological” alone. The SANE effect is specifically activated by neuroscience terminology and imagery, not psychological terminology. In fact, many of the original SANE studies examined psychological phenomena precisely because adding brain-based language made those explanations more persuasive than they would otherwise be. 

However, the field of psychological safety is certainly vulnerable to people abusing the SANE effect. We’ve seen an increase in the popularity of psychological safety explanations that lean heavily on neuroscience or terms like “rewiring neural pathways” as language to make certain (often rather wild) claims seem more robust and credible.

What do we do with the SANE Effect?

In fact, it’s worth noting that we all do versions of this at times; Oppenheimer notes that people often use more complex language when we feel insecure – the complex language becomes a shield, a (possibly false) signal of expertise and experience (or at least more expertise and experience than the person we’re making the claim to). Complex language can be a way that we attempt to be taken more seriously. It can also, of course, be a joy: many of us love to indulge in evocative, flowery language, and finding a term that means a very specific, obscure thing can be highly satisfying. I recently came across a wonderful usage of the word oleaginous to describe someone, and it was satisfyingly perfect.

So what do we do about the SANE Effect? We certainly shouldn’t reject neuroscience, and nor should we flatten everything into oversimplified language. What is powerful is to learn to notice when we’re potentially being seduced by it. Sometimes complex language and neuroscience is doing real work, and sometimes the right word is the obscure but precise one. We can, however, check in with ourselves when we come across neurosciency explanations and ask some key questions:

What does the neuroscience actually add?
Does it actually deepen our understanding of the claim, help explain the mechanism, or affect what we do in practice? If not, it might just be marketing.

Would the explanation still stand without it?
If removing the neuro- or brain reference doesn’t weaken the argument, it probably wasn’t doing much work.

Is this helpful precision, or theatre?
Sometimes complexity is necessary. Sometimes it’s just costume – the Emperors’ New Clothes.

Does this language make challenging the claim easier or harder?
If an idea feels harder to question because of how it’s framed, it might be a sign that the people making the claim don’t want it to be challenged.

None of this should be interpreted as an argument against neuroscience, expertise, or complexity where it genuinely helps us understand the world. But it is a reminder to remain a little sceptical of ideas that arrive dressed in the aesthetics of robust science. I don’t think the danger is that people will believe nonsense; it’s that weak ideas sometimes get a free pass when they sound neurosciency enough. 

Further reading:

Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E. and Gray, J.R., 2008. The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 20(3), pp.470-477. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2778755/ 

The public find articles about education more convincing when they contain extraneous neuroscience
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/public-find-articles-about-education-more-convincing-when-they-contain-extraneous 

Psychology students are seduced by superfluous neuroscience: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/psychology-students-are-seduced-superfluous-neuroscience

People are quicker to dismiss evidence from psychology than neuroscience: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/people-are-quicker-dismiss-evidence-psychology-neuroscience 

“Soft and fluffy” – what medical students think of their psychology lectures: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/soft-and-fluffy-what-medical-students-think-their-psychology-lectures 

Oppenheimer, D.M. (2006) Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 20, 139-156. https://cahill.people.unm.edu/480-21/Oppenheimer-2006-Applied_Cognitive_Psychology.pdf