Drew Westen's academic guru tricks

Kevin Drum nails something that makes me crazy -- the way that wannabe gurus like George Lakoff and Drew Westen use academic credibility to legitimate ideas that aren't backed by specific research:

Unfortunately, [Drew] Westen [the author of The Political Brain] then falls into the same traps that George Lakoff falls into. First, he uses his position as a clinical psychologist to pretend that the advice he's offering is based on some kind of deep understanding of how the brain works. For the most part, though, it's really not, no matter how many times he tosses off the phrase "activating a network." There are a few nods here and there to brain research — some of which is genuinely interesting — but the bulk of the book is just Westen offering advice the same way any political consultant offers advice. This spurious appeal to authority probably shouldn't bug me as much as it does, but there you have it. It bugs me.

Update 6/27 9:38 PM: If Westen's agenda isn't clear, this is all you need to know -- he has a consulting firm with the inane tagline "To move people, you have to understand the neural networks that connect ideas, images, and emotions in their minds."

On a related note, a friend reminds me of a very relevant study (PDF):

The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations
Deena Skolnick Weisberg*, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, & Jeremy R. Gray

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naive adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.