It is important to remember that amateurs built the ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.
Dr. Ben Carson
Ten years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a short book, On Bullshit, about the way language is used to obscure rather than clarify what is happening. Last month, Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo published a paper entitled “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit” in the respected psychological journal Judgment and Decision Making. Pseudo-profound bullshit refers to statements such as, “Hidden meaning transforms abstract beauty”—statements which might sound impressive if you don’t think about them, but which are actually meaningless nonsense.
Unlike Frankfurt, who wrote mainly about bullshitters, Pennycook and his colleagues focus their attention on the “bullshittee,” the gullible person. With the help of a website called the New Age Bullshit Generator, they constructed a measure, the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR), which consists of ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements such as the above example. Participants were asked to rate each sentence on a 5-point scale, from “not at all profound” to “very profound.” The authors then conducted four studies to examine the relationship between BSR scores and both content and process measures of bullshit receptivity. By content I refer to belief in other types of bullshit, and by process I mean being unable or insufficiently motivated to think critically about bullshit. Of course, bear in mind that these are all correlational data, so they don’t demonstrate that any of these variables cause bullshit receptivity.
The participants were college undergraduates in one study and paid volunteers recruited through the internet in the other three. The average score on the BSR was 2.6, midway between “somewhat” and “fairly profound,” suggesting a disturbing amount of bullshit receptivity. In three of the studies, the authors included real world examples of pseudo-profound statements, quotations from spiritualist Deepak Chopra. The tendency to rate Chopra’s ideas as profound was strongly related to scores on the BSR. To ensure that they were not simply measuring a tendency to see any statement as profound, the researchers also calculated bullshit sensitivity—the difference between BSR scores and ratings of sentences that were genuinely meaningful. Bullshit sensitivity was strongly related to bullshit receptivity.
Content. Pennycook included several scales to measure what he described as “belief in things for which there is no evidence.” Participants completed an Ontological Confusion Scale, which required them to distinguish between statements that are literally true (“Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player”) and metaphorical statements (“Friends are the salt of life”). (The opening comment by Ben Carson illustrates exactly this sort of ontological confusion.) Some of the studies also included a Religious Belief Scale; a Paranormal Belief Scale, which included acceptance of such things as precognition, mind reading, and extraordinary life forms; and measures of belief in political conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. All of these scales were positively related to bullshit receptivity and to one another, suggesting that there is a constellation of related beliefs held by some people that could be described as bullshit. (Comedians Penn and Teller did a cable TV series from 2003-2010, coincidentally called Bullshit!, which debunked many of these topics. Unfortunately, in one of their early programs they criticized the theory of global warming as bullshit.)
Process. The authors also measured the ability and the motivation to engage in critical thinking. Ability measures included tests of verbal intelligence and numeracy. Measures of motivation to think included the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), in which participants are asked to solve math problems for which there is an “obvious” answer that turns out to be wrong; a test of susceptibility to misleading heuristics and biases such as the gambler’s fallacy and the conjunction fallacy, and a Faith in Intuition Scale. As expected, verbal intelligence, numeracy and CRT scores were predictive of a tendency to see through bullshit, while use of heuristics and biases and Faith in Intuition were related to bullshit acceptance.
My primary reservation about this study is its exclusive focus on the “bullshittee,” which can easily turn into victim blaming at a time when young Americans are exposed to mountains of bullshit, but given insufficient education in bullshit detection. Pseudo-profound statements are only one type of bullshit. In everyday use, the term also refers to statements that are meaningful but are known or strongly suspected to be false. Both types of bullshit are conspicuously present on the presidential campaign trail. Pointing out the presence of bullshit would seem to be a core function of journalism. However, this seldom happens; in fact, journalists are sometimes punished for it on the grounds that informing the public about bullshit shows bias against the bullshitter or his or her political party.