Neurohype: A field guide to exaggerated brain-based claims (original) (raw)
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In recent years, neuroscientific knowledge has been applied far beyond its context of emergence to explain human behaviour in general and to address a host of specific societal problems. In this article, we discuss the emerging research field of ‘neuropolitics’ that seeks to bring neuroscientific methods and findings to political science. Neuropolitics is investigated as a particular way of approaching political problems as located in the brain. We argue that neuropolitics research gives expression to a rationality of government that allows researchers to put forward policy prescriptions based on neuroscientific knowledge. Neuropolitics thus run the risk of leading to what we call a ‘pathologisation of politics’, that turns political problems into biological deviations.
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All political behavior is reflected in the brain, yet the brain has been treated largely as a black box by political science because of the previous limitations on our ability to make useful inferences about it. Despite being a very young field, social cognitive and affective neuroscience (SCAN) has already converged on a set of consistent results that have been verified though a variety of methods.
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