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Psychological study: "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pseudo-intellectual-profound-bullshit-study_5661acb4e4b079b2818e4020?cps=gravity_2442_1202207334025504522http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
Abstract
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.
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Study 1
We presented participants with ten statements that have syntactic structure but that consist of a series of randomly selected vague buzzwords. Participants were asked to indicate the relative profundity of each statement on a scale from 1 (not at all profound) to 5 (very profound). We argue that high ratings indicate receptivity toward bullshit. Participants also completed a series of relevant cognitive and demographic questions.
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Study 2
In Study 1, at least some participants appeared to find meaning in a series of statements that contained a random collection of vague buzzwords organized in a sentence with syntactic structure. This tendency was significantly related to cognitive variables of conceptual interest in expected ways. In Study 2 we set out to replicate this pattern of results using real-world examples of bullshit. For this, we created an additional scale using particularly vague “tweets” from Deepak Chopra’s “Twitter” account (see Table S2). We also expanded our measures of analytic cognitive style by including self-report measures of analytic and intuitive thinking disposition. Finally, we expanded our cognitive ability measures by increasing the number of items on the numeracy
test and including a common measure of fluid intelligence.
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Study 3
The goal of Study 3 was to test the possibility that some people may be particularly insensitive to pseudo-profound bullshit, presumably because they are less capable of detecting conflict during reasoning. For this, we created a scale using ten motivational quotations that are conventionally considered to be profound (e.g., “A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence”) in that they are written in plain language and do not contain the vague buzzwords that are characteristic of the statements used in Studies 1 and 2. The difference between profundity ratings between legitimately meaningful quotations and pseudo-profound bullshit will serve as our measures of bullshit sensitivity. Secondarily, we also included mundane statements that contained clear meaning but that would not be considered conventionally profound (e.g., “Most people enjoy some sort of music”). If the association between analytic thinking and profundity ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit is due to bullshit detection in particular, analytic thinking should not be associated with profundity ratings for mundane statements.
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Study 4
The results of Study 3 indicate that the association between profoundness ratings and reflective thinking is largely specific to bullshit items. The lack of correlation between heuristics and biases performance and profoundness ratings for motivational quotations, in particular, indicates that more reflective participants are not merely more skeptical toward all manner of profound-sounding statements. However, there was an unequal number of bullshit (N= 20) and motivational (N= 10) items in Study 3. Moreover, it is unclear whether the inclusion of mundane statements interacted in some way with participants’ evaluation of the bullshit and motivational statements. Thus, in Study 4, we asked participants to rate the relative profoundness of 20 randomly intermixed statements (10 bullshit and 10 motivational). In Study 3, we did not include any measures of epistemically suspect beliefs. Thus, in Study 4, participants completed the heuristics and biases battery, along with measures of paranormal belief, conspiracist ideation, and endorsement of complementary and alternative medicine.
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Results:
Most importantly, we have provided evidence that individuals vary in conceptually interpretable ways in their propensity to ascribe profundity to bullshit statements; a tendency we refer to as “bullshit receptivity”. Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
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In Study 3, some people even rated entirely mundane statements (e.g., “Most people enjoy at least some sort of music”) as at least somewhat profound. Our results suggest that this tendency – which resembles a general gullibility factor – is a component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.
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Namely, we created a bullshit “sensitivity” measure by subtracting profundity ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit from ratings for legitimate motivational quotations. Increased bullshit sensitivity was associated with better performance on measures of analytic thinking. ... Further, bullshit sensitivity was associated with lower paranormal belief, but not conspiratorial ideation or acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine. This was not predicted as all three forms of belief are considered “epistemically suspect” (e.g., Pennycook, et al., in press). One possible explanation for this divergence is that supernatural beliefs are a unique subclass because they entail a conflict between some immaterial claim and (presumably universal) intuitive folk concepts (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). ... Pennycook et al. (2014) found that degree of belief in supernatural religious claims (e.g., angels, demons) is negatively correlated with conflict detection effects in a reasoning paradigm. This result suggests that the particularly robust association between pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity and supernatural beliefs may be because both response bias and conflict detection (sensitivity) support both factors. Further research is needed to test this claim.
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