Can You Change a Student's Mind in a Course about the Brain? Belief Change Following an Introductory Course in Biological Psychology.

Undergraduate courses in the neurosciences, including biological psychology, often appeal to students because they offer perspectives on human behavior and experience that are so different from those students arrive with or are exposed to elsewhere on campus. Consider, for example, this passage from Crick’s, Astonishing Hypothesis: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Unfortunately, because this perspective is at such odds with those many students arrive with, the very thing that makes these classes so interesting is also likely to engender resistance. With Crick’s hypothesis serving as the theme of my introductory course in biological psychology, we explore the ways in which complex experiences and behaviors can be explained by lower-level, biological phenomena. Historically, and for a host of valid reasons, class assessment tends to focus on whether students understand the course material (e.g., Can you explain the role of Ca 2+ in synaptic transmission?), rather than whether students believe what they have been introduced to (e.g., Do you believe that the mind exists as something separate from the body?). For a number of years, however, I have also been collecting pre- and post-test data from students enrolled in three formats of the class in an effort to measure changes in beliefs. One format was a conventional standalone class, whereas the other two were more intensive and involved parallel coursework in the Philosophy of Mind with a second instructor. The full assessment, identical at both test intervals, was comprised of 56 items and included 16 items from a Theoretical Orientation Scale (TOS; Coan, 1979), several of which addressed whether human behavior was predictable; 14 items that addressed dualism, the veracity of our perceptions, personal responsibility, and other topics; and 26 items from the Organicism-Mechanism Paradigm Inventory (OMPI; Germer et al., 1982). Unlike most of the other test items, which addressed class topics specifically, the OMPI addressed general worldviews between two poles of mechanism and organicism. Mechanistic explanations, common in Neuroscience, tend to be highly reductive and treat organisms as more passive and reactive, whereas organismic explanations treat organisms as more active and the systems that give rise to their behaviors as non-reductive. Overall, analyses revealed statistically significant changes on a wide range of items that were generally, though not always, consistent with course objectives. The results of the OMPI indicated that the average student began the term closer to the organismic end of the scale, and became slightly more organismic by the end of the term. And yet, on a number of items related more specifically to the relationship between brain and behavior, students became more willing to endorse reductive and mechanistic positions. Although student beliefs can be very resistant to persuasion, change can occur.