<p>Interdisciplinary engagement between cognitive science and law has expanded significantly in recent years, promising greater empirical grounding for normative analysis. Yet this development also introduces a less examined risk: the selective assimilation of scientific knowledge in ways that privilege intuitively coherent narratives while marginalising theoretically disruptive insights. This article identifies and analyses a recurring pattern of selective epistemic uptake in normative contexts, whereby scientific claims are not merely applied but actively reshaped to fit pre-existing cognitive expectations and institutional demands. Drawing on contemporary cognitive frameworks and philosophy of science, the paper argues that scientific literature, as incorporated into legal reasoning, often appears in partial or decontextualised forms that no longer preserve the explanatory conditions under which its authority is warranted. This process gives rise to forms of explanatory overreach, in which conditional and context-sensitive findings are transformed into generalised accounts of behaviour, frequently crossing levels of explanation without adequate mediation. Rather than treating these issues as isolated instances of misuse, the article proposes that they reflect systematic pressures toward narrative stabilisation in domains that require coherent attributions of agency and responsibility. The contribution of the paper is diagnostic: it isolates a distinct mechanism operating prior to justificatory reasoning, through which scientific explanations are selectively reconstituted as epistemically available inputs for normative judgements, thereby shaping the evidential basis on which legal responsibility is assessed.</p>