Page:On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.pdf/11

Table 4: Pearson product-moment correlations (Study 4). BSR = Bullshit Receptivity scale; CAM = Complementary and alternative medicine. Bottom diagonal = full sample (N = 232). Top diagonal = Participants with knowledge of Deepak Chopra excluded (N = 134). Cronbach’s alphas for the full sample are reported in brackets. ∗∗∗ p < .001, ∗∗ p < .01, ∗ p < .05.

On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit Table 4

17General discussion

The present study represents an initial investigation of the individual differences in receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit. We gave people syntactically coherent sentences that consisted of random vague buzzwords and, across four studies, these statements were judged to be at least somewhat profound. This tendency was also evident when we presented participants with similar real-world examples of pseudo-profound bullshit. 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. Finally, we introduced a measure of pseudo-profound bullshit sensitivity by computing a difference score between profundity ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit and legitimately meaningful motivational quotations. This measure was related to analytic cognitive style and paranormal skepticism. However, there was no association between bullshit sensitivity and either conspiratorial ideation or acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Nonetheless, our findings are consistent with the idea that the tendency to rate vague, meaningless statements as profound (i.e., pseudoprofound bullshit receptivity) is a legitimate psychological phenomenon that is consistently related to at least some variables of theoretical interest.

17.1Response bias and sensitivity

We proposed two mechanisms that explain why people might rate bullshit as profound. The first is a type of response bias wherein some individuals are simply more prone to relatively high profundity ratings. Although this mechanism is not specific to bullshit, it may at least partly explain why our pseudo-profound bullshit measure was so consistently positively correlated with epistemically suspect beliefs. Some people may have an uncritically open mind. As the idiom goes: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out”. 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 pseudoprofound bullshit receptivity. There is, of course, a great deal of research on this sort of mechanism. As a prominent example, consider the “Barnum effect”. In his classic demonstration of gullibility, Forer (1949) had introductory psychology students complete a personality measure (the “Diagnostic Interest Blank”, DIB). One week later, he gave each of the students an ostensibly personalized personality sketch that consisted of 13 statements and asked them to rate both the accuracy of the statements and the overall efficacy of the DIB. Unbeknownst to the students, Forer had actually given every student the same personality sketch that consisted entirely of vague, generalized statements taken from a newsstand astrology book (e.g., “You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.”). Although some people were more skeptical than others, the lowest number of specific statements accepted was 8 (out of 13). Moreover, the students were quite convinced of the personality tests’ efficacy – “All of the students accepted the DIB as a good or perfect instrument for personality measurement” (Forer, 1949, p. 121). Meehl (1956) first referred to this as the Barnum effect, after the notorious hoaxer (bullshitter) P. T. Barnum.^[1]

1. In an amusing irony, P. T. Barnum is often erroneously attributed the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute.” This is true even in at least one review of research on the Barnum effect (Furnham & Shofield, 1987).