It appears people are easily persuaded by ideas when presented alongside neurological jargon. Experiments by Deena Weisberg and colleagues at Yale give us an insight into how neuroscientific explanations exert a powerful influence on our beliefs. Participants were divided into four groups, each of which read brief explanations of psychological phenomena (none of which required a neuroscientific explanation); half the participants read good explanations, the other half bad explanations (i.e. they merely restated a description of the phenomenon). In addition, half the participants saw spurious neuroscientific justifications for the explanation specifying an area of activation in the brain (irrelevant to the explanation), whilst the other half did not. Participants then had to rate how satisfied they were with the explanations given for each phenomenon. Participants could tell the difference between the good and bad explanations, but for novices and students taking a cognitive neuroscience course, the presence of the irrelevant neuroscientific information led them to judge the explanations, particularly the bad explanations, more favourably. On the other hand, the expert participants (who had completed advanced degrees in subjects like cognitive neuroscience or cognitive psychology) rated the good explanations a bit worse when accompanied by a spurious neuroscientific explanation (though this has yet to be replicated in other experiments).