It's the paper that needs little introduction - Ed Vul et. al.'s "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience". If you haven't already heard about it, read the Neurocritic's summary here or the summary at BPS research digest here. Ed Vul's personal page has some interesting further information here. (Probably the most extensive discussion so far, with a very comprehensive collection of links, is here.)
Few neuroscience papers have been discussed so widely, so quickly, as this one. (Nature, New Scientist, Newsweek, Scientific American have all covered it.) Sadly, both new and old media commentators seem to have been more willing to talk about the implications of the controversy than to explain exactly what is going on. This post is a modest attempt to, first and foremost, explain the issues, and then to evaluate some of the strengths and limitations of Vul et al's paper.
[Full disclosure:
I'm an academic neuroscientist who uses fMRI, but I've never performed any of the kind of correlational analyses discussed below. I have no association with Vul et al., nor - to my knowledge - with any of the authors of any of the papers in the firing line. ]
