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.
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