Tingley critique , and guiding assessment Neurological imaging as evidence in political science : a review

Political scientists have access to a number of competing methodologies that marshal different forms of evidence for their arguments about political phenomena. Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in political science research and, more frequently, economics: spatially explicit and time-varying neurological activity of human subjects engaged in political or economic decision-making. As with any of the more standard methodologies, this approach carries with it a set of orienting theories linking hypotheses with the types of data induced to support or falsify these theories. While this new form of evidence is exciting, especially for the empirically minded social scientist, it deserves the utmost scrutiny. I provide a review of how neurological imaging is being used in the social sciences and consider several problems and prospects of using neuroimaging data in political science.