On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

By Gordon Pennycook, J. Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, Jonathan A. Fugelsang. Judgment and Decision Making, 2015

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c40052fa8d0b981a96992eabfb50bdce4cfe88a1

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Citations in the corpus

Are neoliberals more susceptible to bullshit? (2016, background): “In an analysis of previously unpublished data collected by Pennycook et al. (2015) we investigated the possibility that there would be ideological differences in bullshit receptivity and that such differences would be partially explained by cognitive style and ability variables (e.g., Jost et al., 2”
On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal, political, religious, and science beliefs (2019, background): “There is also evidence that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in a variety of epistemically suspect beliefs (Pennycook et al., 2015a), such as in paranormal and religious beliefs (Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler & Fugelsang, 2012; Pennycook, Ross, Koehler & Fugelsang, 2016; Shenhav,…”
An examination of the underlying dimensional structure of three domains of contaminated mindware: paranormal beliefs, conspiracy beliefs, and anti-science attitudes (2020, positive): “These results are consistent with and extend previous research examining associations between those individual differences and unwarranted beliefs (e.g., Lindeman et al., 2015; Lobato et al., 2014; Pennycook et al., 2015a; Stanovich et al., 2016; Swami et al, 2014).”
Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI (2024, background): “…align more closely with an alternative theoretical perspective that posits a central role for analytic thinking in protecting against epistemically suspect beliefs and behaviors ( 14 ), such as superstitions and paranormal beliefs ( 43 ), misinformation ( 44 ), and pseudo-profound bullshit ( 45 ).”
The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, methodology): “Performance on tasks such as the Cognitive Reflection Test are associated with a wide range of beliefs and behaviors [138], including actual social media behaviors observed on Twitter ([71]; also [109]), as well as conspiracy ideation [139], politics [140], bullshit receptivity [12], and endorsement”