Jack Shafer at Slate runs a periodic column where he calls newspapers to task for over-using anonymous sources. An example passage culled from a New York Times article:
Republicans close to the White House said Mr. Bush was the driver of the changes made so far, including the decision to ask Mr. Rove to focus primarily on the midterm elections.
Why, Shafer asks, do those “Republicans” need to be kept anonymous down to their number (are there 2? 3?). Shafer feels this over-use of anonymous sources is at best getting in the way of informing the public, and at worse hiding people with ulterior motives.
As of this entry, I’m starting my own watch-dog column: newspapers which write inane articles espousing mind/brain duality. The latest offender is, coincidentally, The New York Times, which ran a disappointing article a few days ago called “My Cortex Made Me Buy It.” It describes a recent study in which people sampled “cheap” and “expensive” wines (actually the exact same wines, just marked with different prices).
When they sampled the wines with lower prices, however, the subjects not only liked them less, their brains registered less pleasure from the experience.
It’s important to consider what the alternative was: that subjects reported liking the cheaper wines less, but their brains reported the same amount of pleasure. What would that mean? One possibility is that the participants were lying: they liked both wines the same, but said they liked the more expensive ones more in order to look cultured.
There’s another possibility. Dan Gilbert, who studies happiness, usually does so by simply asking people if they are happy. He doesn’t worry much about people lying. He could use a physiological measure (like a brain scan, as was done in the above study), but he points out that the reason we think a particular part of the brain is related to happiness is because it correlates with people’s self-reports of being happy. Using the brain scan is completely circular. Under this logic, if the brain scans fail to show more pleasure when drinking the expensive wine, it could be because the relevant areas of the brain have been misidentified.
A final alternative possibility is that the participants’ immaterial souls liked the expensive wine better, but their brains didn’t register a difference.
The Times piece discussed none of this.
PDF 
I doubt there are any folks out there anymore who really believe the mind does not emerge from brain physiology and chemistry, even though Steven Pinker finds such people useful as straw-men to attack.
As I state in that linked book review: “Who can claim — at least from a scientific perspective — that the mind is an entity separate from the physical brain?”
In other words, we who read your blog all know the mind is not separable from the brain. But it is sometimes convenient to assume that some still believe the mind is a mystical ghost in the machine, yet separable from the machine.
However, in this case, I don’t see any implication of the Mind-Brain duality in either the research or the writer’s entertaining personal reflections on it. The only hint of that way of thinking is in the headline, “My Cortex Made Me But It.” Hey, a headline writer’s gotta have some fun, right?
I think your watchdog over-reacted on this one.
Woof!
Fred Bortz — Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
I too agree – but on different terms. They wrote about the study and, the study, which when viewed through your interpretation, is incorrect because there are multiple possibilities of the end result they got. I read your comments to mean they are attaching a higher cause/effect relationship than one should when dealing with people and their stated impressions.
This would seem to be an artifact of the study itself and the publishing venue that should have reviewed it – rather than the newspaper that reported on it.
Eric
I was drawn to this entry because of the title. So imagine my surprise to see my name appear in it!
I fear I have to side with the watchdog here. If subjects have two different reactions to two tastes of wine (as measured by their verbal reports) then their brains MUST have had two different reactions as well. Only a dualist would find the mere EXISTENCE of two corresponding brain states to be of interest (and I think we can safely assume that journalists only report on findings they believe to be of interest). For a materialist there is no other possibility and thus this fact is dull as toast.
However, what COULD be interesting — even to a materialist — is the NATURE of those two brain states. The fact that THESE regions are active when I think I am drinking an expensive wine and THOSE regions are active when I think I am drinking a cheap wine can be a useful fact. It is the nature of the different brain states and not the fact of their existence that warrants (or fails to warrant) the journalist’s attention.
Watchdog writes: “It’s important to consider what the alternative was: that subjects reported liking the cheaper wines less, but their brains reported the same amount of pleasure. What would that mean? One possibility is that the participants were lying: they liked both wines the same, but said they liked the more expensive ones more in order to look cultured.”
Actually, such a result could only mean one thing: The brain imagining technique simply isn’t sensitive enough to detect differences that MUST BY DEFINITION exist. Indeed, even if subjects tell a lie in one case and not in the other, the diffeferent actions of lying and truth-telling require the existence of different brain states that a sufficiently sensitive device should be able to detect.
The NY Times, like most serious sources of science journalism, does occasionally ask us to be amazed about the mere fact that different brain states underlie different experiences, thoughts, feelings, or actions. In so doing, it is indeed guilty of pandering to the 17th century dualist philosophy that is still held by the general public. The fact that everything that happens in the mind is reflected in the brain is simply NOT news, and journalists should ask themselves whether the studies they are reporting tell us anything more than that. Sometimes the answer is yes, but often the answer is no.
BTW, psychologist Paul Bloom of Yale University has written extensively — and much more eloquently than I have here — about this topic.
Daniel Gilbert — http://www.danielgilbert.com
I think Daniel Gilbert did a much better job of explaining what I found troubling about this article. Thank you for that. Fred — what do you think?
Please try my web-based experiments
I agree that Gilbert’s contribution is a good one. Is it better than the original post? That’s a judgment call.
But here’s where I see things differently:
The reason I think the watchdog overreacted is because the columnist and headline writer were having a bit of fun with a well-reported scientific result in “My Cortex Made Me Buy It”.
If the article were intended as a scientific story, I would hold it to different standards. But this is a columnist reflecting in a light-hearted “basic instincts” column of what that research means to her.
She has decided to trust her olfactory sensations and the pleasure of sharing Blue Nun in a box with her friend–and to heck with whether it may be considered cheap.
She finds it amusing that a high price tag influences people so that they not only report greater satisfaction but actually experience it. The brain studies show that they are neither lying to the experimenters nor rationalizing to themselves about their reported greater pleasure. The pleasure is physiologically real.
Even in its humor, the column seems to convey this key scientific finding quite well: People are not very good at separating the various influences that cause them to experience pleasure, even if their higher brain function tells them that one of those influences is (at least in part) artificial.
I’d say the watchdog ought to be employed to criticize articles intended to present the science. Ferocious Fido should allow people like the columnist to share their humorous reflections on the human condition without worrying about the snarling of canine scientists who criticize the column for not being what the author never intended it to be.
Fred Bortz — Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)