By Marc
Abrahams in Improbable Research
“On the Reception
and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit,”Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Judgment
and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563. The
authors, at the University of Waterloo, explain:
“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."
BONUS: Social Media and
Bullshit