Tag Archives: critical thinking

Bullshit: A Footnote

Cognitive psychology, Media, Politics, ,

A year ago, I wrote a short piece entitled “Bullshit,” about research using Gordon Pennycook’s Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR). The BSR measures willingness to see as profound ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements, such as “Imagination is inside exponential space time events.” The scale also includes ten mundane but meaningful statements (“A wet person does not fear the rain”) to correct for the tendency to rate every statement as profound. Pennycook defines bullshit sensitivity as the difference between the ratings of the ten pseudo-profound bullshit statements and the ten mundane statements.

In January 2016, two German psychologists, Stefan Pfattheicher and Simon Schindler, asked 196 American volunteers recruited on the internet to complete the BSR. Participants also rated, on 5-point scales, their favorability toward six American presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders. Finally, they rated themselves on a 7-point scale of liberalism-conservatism.

Above are the correlations between scores on the BSR and the political attitude measures. The darker yellow bars are the most important, since they are the correlations with bullshit sensitivity, which control for agreement with the mundane statements. Favorable ratings of the three Republican candidates and of conservatism were all positively related to bullshit receptivity. In other words, conservatives appear to be more easily impressed by bullshit. Democratic partisans, on the other hand, were not as susceptible to bullshit.

These are correlations. They do not mean that conservatism causes bullshit receptivity, or vice versa. However, they do suggest that conservatives may be more likely to accept statements as profound without thinking carefully about what they actually mean.

The Need For Cognition Scale measures people’s tendency to engage in and enjoy critical thinking. (One of the items reads, “I only think as hard as I have to.”) In an interview, social psychologist John Jost reported the results of a not-yet-published review of 40 studies in which 25 of them found a significant tendency for conservatives to be lower in need for cognition.

To be fair, I should report that Dan Kahan, in a highly publicized study, found no differences between liberals and conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test, a measure of a person’s ability to resist seemingly obvious, but wrong, conclusions. (“If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The answer is not 100 minutes.) However, Jost claims that 11 other studies showed that liberals outperform conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test.

These studies may be relevant to current concerns about Americans’ susceptibility to fake news and the possibility that we are living in a “post-truth” era. The Oxford Dictionary has chosen post-truth, defined as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” as its 2016 word of the year. Last week, a man blasted a Washington pizza shop with an assault rifle after reading a fake news story that the shop was the home of a child sex ring being run by Hillary Clinton.

The editors of BuzzFeed News analyzed 1,145 stories forwarded through Facebook but originating in three left-wing (Addicting Information, Occupy Democrats and The Other 98%), three right-wing (Eagle Rising, Freedom Daily and Right Wing News), and three mainstream (CNN, ABC and Politico) sources of political news. The fact that these stories were forwarded suggests that the person who did so was impressed by them. Two people independently rated each story as mostly true, mostly false, or a mixture of true and false statements. Differences of opinion were resolved by a third reader. The results showed more fake news at the right-wing sites.

The study is flawed. There is no assurance that the nine chosen sites are representative of all sites within the three categories, and the authors don’t say how they knew a story was true or false. Nevertheless, convergent evidence from different sources seems to points to the same conclusion: Conservatives are more willing consumers of bullshit, including fake news stories.

Most articles about fake news end with the recommendation that mainstream journalists be more aggressive in identifying false claims made by politicians and pundits. However, surveys show that conservatives are more likely than liberals to distrust mainstream news sources. Mr. Trump may have neutralized this approach by telling his followers that the mainstream media peddle bullshit—which, in fact, they sometimes do.

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit

Framing the Debates

Guarding the Hen House

Bullshit

Cognitive psychology

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.