Source: Beao CC0 via Wikimedia Commons

The science of psychology aims to explain all kinds of aspects of the human experience all the way from low-level behaviors like reaching for an object or perceiving a shape to high-level elements like love, , , and imagination.

While scientists approach each of these kinds of questions, not everyone is so sure that science can explain all of the elements of human behavior. A fascinating paper by Sara Gottlieb and Tania Lombrozo in the January 2018 issue of Psychological Science explores people’s intuitions about what the science of psychology can and cannot explain.

Across several studies, the researchers asked participants to make ratings about a variety of topics that psychology studies ranging from low-level to high-level topics including aspects of and human emotion. The studies were done both with participants drawn from online sources as well as with college students who are taking introductory psychology.

The first big observation involved ratings of scientific possibility and scientific comfort. People’s judgments of how likely it is that science can explain a particular aspect of human behavior were highly correlated with how comfortable people are with science explaining this topic. For example, people are much less comfortable with science explaining how people fall in love than with explaining . They also think scientists will be better able to explain depression than how people fall in love.

The studies also dug deeper into the specific factors that predicted judgments of possibility and comfort.

The more a topic involves introspection or consciousness, the less likely people think it can be explained scientifically. People don’t have much conscious access to how they reach out and grab an object, so that seems like a good topic for scientific study. People have a rich experience of falling in love, and that seems like a less appropriate subject of scientific scrutiny. Further, the more an ability seems to make humans special, the less people tend to think it is a good candidate for scientific study. Perceiving shapes is something that many animals do while making moral decisions is something that seems uniquely human.

Finally, there was a smaller, positive relationship between aspects of our psychology that people think are good ones to have and the perceived likelihood that they can be explained. This relationship was weaker and emerged only when introspection and specialness were also taken into account.

People’s judgments about what can be studied scientifically are not an indication of what can actually be explained. Some of them seem to be wishful thinking. That is, there are things that people believe to be special about themselves or about humans in general, and the idea that these things could be explained scientifically is disconcerting.

At the same time, it is important to understand that even if there is a scientific explanation of the things that you hold most dear, that doesn’t necessarily change what it is like to experience those things. If the factors that lead people to fall in love were completely understood, that wouldn’t make the experience any less beautiful.