On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2015, Vol 10, Issue 6
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.
Authors and Affiliations
Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler and Jonathan A. Fugelsang
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678205
- DOI -
- Views 135
- Downloads 0
On emotion specificity in decision making: Why feeling is for doing
We present a motivational account of the impact of emotion on decision making, termed the feeling-is-for-doing approach. We first describe the psychology of emotion and argue for a need to be specific when studying emoti...
Predicting soccer matches: A reassessment of the benefit of unconscious thinking
We evaluate Dijksterhuis, Bos, van der Leij, & van Baaren (2009), Psychological Science, on the benefit of unconscious thinking in predicting the outcomes of soccer matches. We conclude that the evidence that unconscious...
Regret salience and accountability in the decoy effect
Two experiments examined the impact on the decoy effect of making salient the possibility of post-decision regret, a manipulation that has been shown in several earlier studies to stimulate critical examination and impro...
Cognitive conflict in social dilemmas: An analysis of response dynamics
Recently, it has been suggested that people are spontaneously inclined to cooperate in social dilemmas, whereas defection requires effortful deliberation. From this assumption, we derive that defection should entail more...
The attraction effect in motor planning decisions
In motor lotteries the probability of success is inherent in a person’s ability to make a speeded pointing movement. By contrast, in traditional economic lotteries, the probability of success is explicitly stated. Decisi...