Gordon Pennycook

“ Whereas reflexive openmindedness results from an intuitive mindset that is very accepting of information without very much processing, reflective open-mindedness (or active open-mindedness; e.g., Baron, Scott, Fincher & Metz, 2014) results from a mindset that searches for information as a means to facilitate critical analysis and reflection. Thus, the former should cause one to be more receptive of bullshit whereas the latter, much like analytic cognitive style, should guard against it. ”

“ An understanding of more precisely nuanced meanings of words may reveal inconsistencies, incongruities, and conflicts among terms in bullshit statements. Conflict detection is a key aspect of dual-process theories (e.g., De Neys, 2012; Pennycook, et al., 2015) , though in this case it remains unclear precisely what features of bullshit statements might cue reflective thinking. What is it about a statement like “good health imparts reality to subtle creativity” that might cause someone to stop and consider the meaning of the sentence more deeply? ”

“ Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit. The development of interventions and strategies that help individuals guard against bullshit is an important additional goal that requires considerable attention from cognitive and social psychologists. That people vary in their receptivity toward bullshit is perhaps less surprising than the fact that psychological scientists have heretofore neglected this issue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ However, since this aspect of bullshit receptivity relates to one’s mindset when approaching (or being approached with) bullshit, it is therefore not specific to bullshit. Nonetheless, it may be an important component of bullshit receptivity. Put differently, some individuals may have an excessively "open" mind that biases them to make inflated judgments of profundity, regardless of the content. ”

“ 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”. ”

“ Although a reflective thinking style appears to militate against bullshit acceptance, other cognitive processes that underlie the propensity to find meaning in meaningless statements remain to be elucidated. It may be that people naturally assume that statements presented in a psychology study (vague or otherwise) are constructed with the goal of conveying some meaning. ”

“ More intuitive individuals, in contrast, should respond based on a sort of first impression, which will be inflated due to the vagueness of the pseudo-profound bullshit. Analytic thinking is thus the primary focus of our investigation, as it is most directly related to the proposed ability to detect blatant bullshit. ”

“ At the time of this writing, Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on "Twitter" and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular. [6] Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008) . Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005) , bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1) : "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. ”

“ In the current work, we presented the participants with meaningless statements without cueing them to the possibility that they are complete bullshit. Although this is likely how bullshit is often encountered in everyday life, it may be that some skepticism about the source of the statement is the key force that may guard against bullshit acceptance. For example, poems attributed to prestigious sources are evaluated more positively (Bar-Hillel, Maharshak, Moshinsky & Nofech, 2012) . Interpretation is difficult and humans surely rely on simple heuristics (e.g., “do I trust the source?”) ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel" (p. 9) . This qualifies as bullshit under Frankfurt's broad definition because the content is being communicated absent a concern for the truth. Nonetheless, the character of conversational bullshit is likely quite different from pseudo-profound bullshit, and by extension the reception and detection of it may be determined by different psychological factors. ”

“ Although epistemically suspect claims may or may not themselves qualify as bullshit, the lack of skepticism that underlies the acceptance of epistemically suspect claims should also promote positive bullshit receptivity. ”

“ According to Gilbert (1991, following Spinoza) , humans must first believe something to comprehend it. In keeping with this hypothesis, Gilbert, Tafarodi and Malone (1993) found that depleting cognitive resources caused participants to erroneously believe information that was tagged as false. This indicates that people have a response bias toward accepting something as true. This asymmetry between belief and unbelief may partially explain the prevalence of bullshit; we are biased toward accepting bullshit as true and it therefore requires additional processing to overcome this bias. ”

“ Moreover, conflict detection is viewed as an important low-level cognitive factor that causes at least some people to engage deliberative, analytic reasoning processes (Pennycook, Fugelsang & Koehler, 2015) . With respect to bullshit, there are likely many factors that may lead an individual to successfully detect the need for skepticism that will depend on the type of bullshit encountered and the bullshit context. ”

“ Future work should focus on the dual goals of further refining our measure of bullshit receptivity and experimentally modulating profundity ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit.
19⁠Conclusion
Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly correlated with a selective collection of actual "Tweets" from Deepak Chopra's "Twitter" feed (r's = .88–89) . ”

“ The second mechanism relates to a potential inability to detect bullshit, which may cause one to confuse vagueness for profundity. In the words of Sperber (2010) : "All too often, what readers do is judge profound what they have failed to grasp" (p. 583) . Here, the bullshittee is simply unaware that the relevant stimulus requires special consideration. This mechanism is linked to what has been labelled as "conflict monitoring" failures (e.g., De Neys, 2014; Pennycook, Fugelsang & Koehler, 2015) . ”

“ By examining pseudo-profound bullshit in an empirical fashion, we set the stage for further refinement of this important conceptual variable as it converges with and diverges from other related uses of vagueness. We anticipate that there are many variations of vague, ambiguous, or otherwise unclear statements that have unique psychological correlates in varied contexts that are amenable to study.
18⁠Limitations and caveats
Bullshit comes in many forms and we have focused on only one type. ”

“ Do not believe at all, 2) Slightly believe, 3) Moderately believe, 4) Believe fully. An overall CAM score was created by summing the responses (α = .94) .
Participants also completed a ten item personality scale (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003) that indexes individual differences in the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness) . These data will not be considered further.
15.3⁠Procedure
The bullshit and motivational statements were presented first in a unique random order for each participant. ”

“ Following a short demographic questionnaire, participants completed the tasks in the following order: heuristics and biases battery, Wordsum, numeracy, CRT2, CRT1, ontological confusion scale, bullshit receptivity, and religious belief questionnaire.
7⁠Results
The Bullshit Receptivity (BSR) scale had good internal consistency (α = .82) . A summary of descriptive statistics for each item and the full BSR scale is reported in Table S1. The mean profoundness rating was 2.6, which is in-between “somewhat profound” and “fairly profound” on the 5-point scale. ”

“ Indeed, reflective thinkers are less likely to be religious and paranormal believers (e.g., Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook et al., 2012; Shenhav, Rand & Greene, 2012) , and are less likely to engage in conspiratorial ideation (Swami et al., 2014) or believe in the efficacy of alternative medicine (Browne et al., 2015; man, 2011) . Ontological confusions are also more common among believers in the supernatural (e.g., Lindeman, Svedholm-Hakkinen & Lipsanen, 2015; Svedholm & Lindeman, 2013) . ”

“ Focusing on the full sample, profoundness ratings for the BSR items (α = .91) and for Deepak Chopra’s actual tweets (α = .93) were very highly correlated (r = .89) . We combined the two sets of items into a single BSR scale, which had excellent internal consistency (α = .96) . ”

“ A total of 198 participants (98 male, 100 female, Mage = 36, SDage = 11.4) were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in return for pay. Only American residents were permitted to sign up for the study. All participants reported speaking fluent English. Given the novelty of the phenomenon, we chose 200 participants as an arbitrary target sample size, as we determined this would provide adequate power and stability of the correlations. These data were not analyzed until the full sample was completed. ”

“ Analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories. Cognition, 133, 572–585.
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