10 ms·

Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound

148 points by ageofwant 10y ago

squozzer 10y ago
I found almost as laughable the statement that Ds were susceptible to mistaking mundane statements as profound. D: 2+2=4. Wow man! R: 2+2=5. That's what happens when you cut taxes for job creators!
blowski 10y ago
Where do favourable views of Taylor Swift or Ayn Rand sit on this scale? Despite being a bit of a lefty, I can't help but think this article is itself bullshit.
- samirillian 10y ago
  There has to be a joke in there somewhere, right? Maybe the article is itself a test!
  - danielweber 10y ago
    "Are you susceptible to bullshit if it agrees with your priors?"
tomp 10y ago
If I can tell correctly, these statements were used as examples of bullshit (from [1]): 1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. 2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity. 3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena. 4. The future explains irrational facts. 5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events. 6. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself. 7. Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. “Quantum” means an unveiling of the unrestricted. 8. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us. 9. We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself. 10. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy. (I definitely fall prey to 4.) Some additional commentary (from [2]): > Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. The bullshit statement is not merely non-sense, as would also be true of the following, which is not bullshit: > “Unparalleled transforms meaning beauty hidden abstract”. I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to. [1] http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf [2] http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
- raverbashing 10y ago
  > I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to. An important question, certainly.
  - shoo 10y ago
    If we pick the political group "professionals" then Jeff Schmidt's book 'Disciplined Minds' may offer some insights. (It's not really about bullshit, but it is an excellent read).
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    Well ... go to everydayfeminism/reason/(whatever the favorite watering hole for anarchists is). Extract the most common in group lingo words. Mash them together and check. The tribal nature of the internet means there is lots of bullshit content generated as in group signaling/pandering (warning, this statement may also be bullshit)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- venomsnake 10y ago
  > Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. That also describes accurately the pitch of some startups that I was in contact with recently. Blockchain, big data and cloud and 15 more in various permutations.
- DanBC 10y ago
  I too fall victim to 4. Put these in a nice image macro and I can imagine my facebook friends sharing on them their walls. 10, especially.
  - tomp 10y ago
    10 is very Zen.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 10y ago
Funnily, the correlation is higher for Cruz than Trump, also the correlation of mundane statements with profoundness is higher for Clinton (higher than the corr. of BS with Trump)
- pavlov 10y ago
  Trump's campaign personality is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal. The things he says are often stupid, dangerous or wrong, but they're not bullshit in the sense of the OP's study. "We should build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is not bullshit (and therefore it's easy to evaluate how wrong it is). "There needs to be a strong resolve to promote intergovernmental dialogue which can meaningfully improve the lives of millions along the border" would be an example of bullshit about the same topic.
  - mac01021 10y ago
    Doesn't the latter actually mean something? I agree the structure of the sentence is a bit tortured, but it clearly means that someone should advocate vehemently for the two governments to set up a meeting to discuss how to help out people living on the border.
    - pavlov 10y ago
      The latter sentence was the first empty thing that came to my mind, so any meaning is accidental. Even though it superficially means something, there's no "who, what, how" in that sentence: who should advocate for the dialogue, what that dialogue should consist of, or how it would help the people.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > Trump is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal. The Trump University lawsuits are accusing Trump of fraud, which sounds exactly like bullshit to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University
runn1ng 10y ago
I can already see how there will be a meaningful and useful debate here. Politically charged articles are always like that.
zerotimer 10y ago
I haven't read the full article yet but this reminds me of a study last year "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit" which was published in the journal Judgment & Decision Making and was a fun read[1]. I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny: > Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly correlated with a selective collection of actual “Tweets” from Deepak Chopra’s “Twitter” feed (r’s = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular.3 Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own bullshit. The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an important first step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is detected. Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit. [1]http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html
reednj 10y ago
"why people who are less educated than me are too stupid to vote for who I tell them too"
- blowski 10y ago
  "I'm a reasonable and intelligent person. I believe x. If you don't believe x, you're either stupid or unreasonable."
  - Atwood 10y ago
    "Now that I have polarized you into my foil -insert Inigo Montoya quote-"
  - mineshaftgap 10y ago
    The siren song of the 'tolerant' left.
logicallee 10y ago
As an outsider, I found the technical term the profession chose (according to the study, I don't know that branch of study myself), to be profoundly distracting. The profession made a really bad choice by choosing to go with it. It's literally vulgar slang. It's as though a report on being deemed sexual attractiveness called it "fuckability ". The profession should have called it "nonsense" or come up with some other qualifier, not chosen vulgar slang.
- _delirium 10y ago
  It's annoyed me periodically as well, in part because it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "technical term" (its precise definition is quite slippery between authors), and in part because to the extent there is well-defined content, it's mostly just PR trying to oversell more narrow results, which would be better called by some more accurate term. Imo the slang did work okay in its original formulation, where it was mostly just an attention-grabbing headline used by Harry Frankfurt as the title of his book On Bullshit. But that's a joke that works okay the first time, and gets old if you keep repeating it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- return0 10y ago
  Apparently they took "High Bullshit Receptivity Scale statements" , and shortened it to "bullshit" , which is disingenuous. http://search.proquest.com/openview/147f47b65818b1c2cdfca9c029a444c2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=696407 http://search.proquest.com/openview/147f47b65818b1c2cdfca9c0...
mseebach 10y ago
> Participants (N = 196; obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk) That's bound to be a representative sample.
- tinco 10y ago
  Why would it not be?
  - 78666cdc 10y ago
    It's clearly not a random sample of the population.
    - return0 10y ago
      ... and my guess is if they had started with the standard approach (recruit university students) their results wouldn't replicate.
    - tinco 10y ago
      For most psychological research you don't need a very random sample, nor do you need a very large sample. It's got to do with the fact that our brains largely function the same. Your sample has to be large and random enough to be fairly confident that you didn't accidentally pick a significant amount of people with some sort of mental divergence (i.e. very low IQ, very high IQ, autism, psychopathy, etc..) that could be relevant. I don't think picking nearly 200 people from Amazon Turk is going to risk that. But perhaps someone should research what kind of people are on Amazon Turk. Fun exercise, let's modify the conclusion to reflect the specific population bias we think the paper might have: People working for Amazon Turk are more likely to support conservative ideas when they also are susceptible to bullshit. What is a much more important question: What is the distribution of conservative/non-conservative supporters in the group, and how significant is the measured correlation? edit: Just as a disclaimer, I made this comment based on the psych master thesis presentation I've attended of a friend when I was at university where I posed the same question (N was only 16, and only local students were surveyed). He explained to me that for his particular research (pertaining correlation between auditory senses and motor skills) a small group was sufficient because of the fundamental brain structure we (mostly) all share. Whether that holds up for more complex research like this I don't know, I'm not a psych student.
dkopi 10y ago
"We obtained complete data from 196 US-American individuals who participated in an online study via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where researchers can post jobs (such as responding to a questionnaire) which can be completed by users of Amazon Mechanical Turk Only demographic information about sex, age, and in what country participants live was collected" I imagine the type of people who seek income from Mechanical Turk can skew these results significantly.
sfifs 10y ago
Keeping aside the clearly political nature of the content, this study itself seems quite poorly designed & amateurish. A well designed study would mix "bullshit" and "non-bullshit" statements of similar complexity and look at signals on both for comparison. Better still, the "bullshit" statements would be derived from mixing words from the "non-bullshit" statement pool.
- wbillingsley 10y ago
  Funny you should mention that, as I believe it's covered in the author's follow-on research paper "Misperceiving Bullshit as Profoud is Associated with Peer-Reviewers of Politically-Oriented plosOne Articles"
  - notahacker 10y ago
    My favourite Onion-worthy line from the article was "research on bullshit is still in its infancy".
- tommorris 10y ago
  A much better paper came out last year that used tweets from Deepak Chopra and quotes from a random "new age wisdom" generator. PDF: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf And there's some followups... Dalton 2016 - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf Reply from Pennycook et al. - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf
  - algorias 10y ago
    I had to chuckle at this passage from the first link: > participants were shown a list of activities (e.g., biking, reading) directly below the following instructions: “Below is a list of leisure activities. If you are reading this, please choose the “other” box below and type in ‘I read the instructions’”. This attention check proved rather difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing The perils of using poorly compensated students for your studies!
return0 10y ago
It's very bad for PLoS to use these clickbaity titles.
- JasonSage 10y ago
  What title would you use instead?
  - return0 10y ago
    "Mechanical Turk users who favor conservatives are more receptive to high-BSR statements."
thaw13579 10y ago
It's not discussed in the paper, but another important point is line between lies and bullshit, and the reality distorting effects of BS: "For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off. … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are." https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar
- humanrebar 10y ago
  I just commented elsewhere, but the Trump University suits are fraud suits. They're exactly about bullshit and lying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University
  - thaw13579 10y ago
    Didn't mean to imply that bullshit excludes lying, just that bullshit instead erodes the concept of truth in people's minds. Thankfully there are laws and records that are less easily eroded...
mikehall314 10y ago
The original source for the pseudo-profound bullshit seems to be http://wisdomofchopra.com/ http://wisdomofchopra.com/
shiftoutbox 10y ago
This is deep
jkldotio 10y ago
Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard. "The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0] How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large. [0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-... [1] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amazon-mechanical-turk-workers/ http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amaz...
- mistermann 10y ago
  Not saying you should draw any conclusions from this, but something I noticed: "Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is avoided [6,7]" [5] leads to: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003596 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909... Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism. It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left-leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's righteousness.
xmlblog 10y ago
"It may be that this finding and the present research in general has an impact on some conservatives in that they might evaluate statements more critically. We invite individuals to start with the present contribution." (emphasis mine)
JulianMorrison 10y ago
This needs to be very careful to avoid the mistake of taking "a sentence disagrees with science" as equivalent to "a sentence is pseudo profound bullshit" or you will get results that simply divide people into belief clades some of which are scientific and some of which are not. An example, if I were to say, "a daily routine of banishing prevents the accumulation of low-level negative entities" that would be starkly in disagreement with science and a true statement in the belief system of western occult magic. Unless of course you simply wish to detect scientificness versus not, and label the whole of "not" as bullshit.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Can you recommend a good daily routine of banishing? My cubicle seems to be accumulating low-level negative entities.
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    The LBRP is reputed to be good.
hellofunk 10y ago
It's also true that oftentimes ideas that are truly profound are instead perceived as bullshit.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  But it's extremely rare for a presidential candidate to ever make a truly profound statement. One exception is Mike Gravel's performance art piece [1], and his after-the-fact explanation of it that he gave later [2]. "I figured out that this is a metaphor. That one is focusing on one life. And then you turn around, throw a rock. That creates ripples. And then you go off to your demise. And lo and behold, the drop in the water becomes our logo." [1] Mike Gravel - Rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8 [2] Mike Gravel Explains The Rock Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY
Lxr 10y ago
This is funny and all but I fear their accepting articles like this damages the cause for PLoS long term. OA journals already have enough trouble with reputation and prestige, which is the main reason Elsevier et al are still in business, and articles like this (and there are too many examples IMO) don't really help.
mineshaftgap 10y ago
"Terrorism has nothing to do with Islam". Would that be considered bullshit?
guscost 10y ago
This is a classic psychology journal ad-hominem: https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hominem/ https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hom...
mjpuser 10y ago
Jason Silva is bullshit. The League on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s Jason silva on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA
- alva 10y ago
  My life is slightly worse having watched those videos
nanis 10y ago
> we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for an online survey. I guess one can publish this kind of bullshit in Psychology journals. There is a crucial difference between experimental economics, and psychology. In economics experiments, participants get paid based on their performance. In this context, that would translate to one's payoff being determined by how well one distinguishes between bullshit and mundane statements. When people get rewarded the same regardless of their responses, things tend to get dominated by people who are there to do the bare minimum, and get paid. My gut feeling is that it is far more likely for participants who do not take the survey seriously to report supporting those Republican candidates. After all, participants also live in the same world, and they bring in all sorts of baggage which this study does nothing to control.
randogp 10y ago
Apparently, in the article's comment section the word "bullshit" triggers a profanity filter. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F01a8325f-089b-434b-badd-7d9b99dadfd0 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Ad...
massysett 10y ago
I now know to ignore anything from plos.org, thanks.
eggman 10y ago
perspective is crucial; this conflict will continue
dspeyer 10y ago
They don't mention Researcher Allegiance Effect. Therefore I suspect they did nothing about it. Given the nature of the study, I feel comfortable ignoring the results on that alone, without bothering to find specific methodological flaws.
siegecraft 10y ago
I wonder what misperceiving the bullshit that is this study as profound says about someone.
- billhendricksjr 10y ago
  That's precisely what makes this article brilliant on multiple levels. I'm a hard core lefty who thinks the Dems are too conservative and I'm laughing with the paper and at myself.
newesthn 10y ago
This is a correlation Bullshit study.
newesthn 10y ago
This is a correlation study on Bullshit.
ghufran_syed 10y ago
Alternative hypotheses regarding the 'misperceiving [random] statements as profound ' group: maybe the group is: 1) more polite? 2) more efficient? (less time wasted on the task - more money per unit time) 3) more fond of poetry? 4) more religious? I think this last would be an interesting hypothesis to test, but like the authors, I have NO evidence that would support any of these hypotheses. However, unlike the authors, it appears I recognize that there is a lack of evidence :)

148 points by ageofwant 10y ago

I found almost as laughable the statement that Ds were susceptible to mistaking mundane statements as profound. D: 2+2=4. Wow man! R: 2+2=5. That's what happens when you cut taxes for job creators!

blowski 10y ago

Where do favourable views of Taylor Swift or Ayn Rand sit on this scale? Despite being a bit of a lefty, I can't help but think this article is itself bullshit.

samirillian 10y ago
There has to be a joke in there somewhere, right? Maybe the article is itself a test!
- danielweber 10y ago
  "Are you susceptible to bullshit if it agrees with your priors?"

tomp 10y ago

If I can tell correctly, these statements were used as examples of bullshit (from [1]): 1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. 2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity. 3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena. 4. The future explains irrational facts. 5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events. 6. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself. 7. Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. “Quantum” means an unveiling of the unrestricted. 8. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us. 9. We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself. 10. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy. (I definitely fall prey to 4.) Some additional commentary (from [2]): > Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. The bullshit statement is not merely non-sense, as would also be true of the following, which is not bullshit: > “Unparalleled transforms meaning beauty hidden abstract”. I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to. [1] http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf [2] http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

raverbashing 10y ago
> I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to. An important question, certainly.
- shoo 10y ago
  If we pick the political group "professionals" then Jeff Schmidt's book 'Disciplined Minds' may offer some insights. (It's not really about bullshit, but it is an excellent read).
- venomsnake 10y ago
  Well ... go to everydayfeminism/reason/(whatever the favorite watering hole for anarchists is). Extract the most common in group lingo words. Mash them together and check. The tribal nature of the internet means there is lots of bullshit content generated as in group signaling/pandering (warning, this statement may also be bullshit)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
venomsnake 10y ago
> Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. That also describes accurately the pitch of some startups that I was in contact with recently. Blockchain, big data and cloud and 15 more in various permutations.
DanBC 10y ago
I too fall victim to 4. Put these in a nice image macro and I can imagine my facebook friends sharing on them their walls. 10, especially.
- tomp 10y ago
  10 is very Zen.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

raverbashing 10y ago

Funnily, the correlation is higher for Cruz than Trump, also the correlation of mundane statements with profoundness is higher for Clinton (higher than the corr. of BS with Trump)

pavlov 10y ago
Trump's campaign personality is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal. The things he says are often stupid, dangerous or wrong, but they're not bullshit in the sense of the OP's study. "We should build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is not bullshit (and therefore it's easy to evaluate how wrong it is). "There needs to be a strong resolve to promote intergovernmental dialogue which can meaningfully improve the lives of millions along the border" would be an example of bullshit about the same topic.
- mac01021 10y ago
  Doesn't the latter actually mean something? I agree the structure of the sentence is a bit tortured, but it clearly means that someone should advocate vehemently for the two governments to set up a meeting to discuss how to help out people living on the border.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    The latter sentence was the first empty thing that came to my mind, so any meaning is accidental. Even though it superficially means something, there's no "who, what, how" in that sentence: who should advocate for the dialogue, what that dialogue should consist of, or how it would help the people.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > Trump is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal. The Trump University lawsuits are accusing Trump of fraud, which sounds exactly like bullshit to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University

runn1ng 10y ago

I can already see how there will be a meaningful and useful debate here. Politically charged articles are always like that.

zerotimer 10y ago

I haven't read the full article yet but this reminds me of a study last year "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit" which was published in the journal Judgment & Decision Making and was a fun read[1]. I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny: > Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly correlated with a selective collection of actual “Tweets” from Deepak Chopra’s “Twitter” feed (r’s = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular.3 Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own bullshit. The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an important first step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is detected. Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit. [1]http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html

reednj 10y ago

"why people who are less educated than me are too stupid to vote for who I tell them too"

blowski 10y ago
"I'm a reasonable and intelligent person. I believe x. If you don't believe x, you're either stupid or unreasonable."
- Atwood 10y ago
  "Now that I have polarized you into my foil -insert Inigo Montoya quote-"
- mineshaftgap 10y ago
  The siren song of the 'tolerant' left.

logicallee 10y ago

As an outsider, I found the technical term the profession chose (according to the study, I don't know that branch of study myself), to be profoundly distracting. The profession made a really bad choice by choosing to go with it. It's literally vulgar slang. It's as though a report on being deemed sexual attractiveness called it "fuckability ". The profession should have called it "nonsense" or come up with some other qualifier, not chosen vulgar slang.

_delirium 10y ago
It's annoyed me periodically as well, in part because it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "technical term" (its precise definition is quite slippery between authors), and in part because to the extent there is well-defined content, it's mostly just PR trying to oversell more narrow results, which would be better called by some more accurate term. Imo the slang did work okay in its original formulation, where it was mostly just an attention-grabbing headline used by Harry Frankfurt as the title of his book On Bullshit. But that's a joke that works okay the first time, and gets old if you keep repeating it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
return0 10y ago
Apparently they took "High Bullshit Receptivity Scale statements" , and shortened it to "bullshit" , which is disingenuous. http://search.proquest.com/openview/147f47b65818b1c2cdfca9c029a444c2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=696407 http://search.proquest.com/openview/147f47b65818b1c2cdfca9c0...

mseebach 10y ago

> Participants (N = 196; obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk) That's bound to be a representative sample.

tinco 10y ago
Why would it not be?
- 78666cdc 10y ago
  It's clearly not a random sample of the population.
  - return0 10y ago
    ... and my guess is if they had started with the standard approach (recruit university students) their results wouldn't replicate.
  - tinco 10y ago
    For most psychological research you don't need a very random sample, nor do you need a very large sample. It's got to do with the fact that our brains largely function the same. Your sample has to be large and random enough to be fairly confident that you didn't accidentally pick a significant amount of people with some sort of mental divergence (i.e. very low IQ, very high IQ, autism, psychopathy, etc..) that could be relevant. I don't think picking nearly 200 people from Amazon Turk is going to risk that. But perhaps someone should research what kind of people are on Amazon Turk. Fun exercise, let's modify the conclusion to reflect the specific population bias we think the paper might have: People working for Amazon Turk are more likely to support conservative ideas when they also are susceptible to bullshit. What is a much more important question: What is the distribution of conservative/non-conservative supporters in the group, and how significant is the measured correlation? edit: Just as a disclaimer, I made this comment based on the psych master thesis presentation I've attended of a friend when I was at university where I posed the same question (N was only 16, and only local students were surveyed). He explained to me that for his particular research (pertaining correlation between auditory senses and motor skills) a small group was sufficient because of the fundamental brain structure we (mostly) all share. Whether that holds up for more complex research like this I don't know, I'm not a psych student.

dkopi 10y ago

"We obtained complete data from 196 US-American individuals who participated in an online study via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where researchers can post jobs (such as responding to a questionnaire) which can be completed by users of Amazon Mechanical Turk Only demographic information about sex, age, and in what country participants live was collected" I imagine the type of people who seek income from Mechanical Turk can skew these results significantly.

sfifs 10y ago

Keeping aside the clearly political nature of the content, this study itself seems quite poorly designed & amateurish. A well designed study would mix "bullshit" and "non-bullshit" statements of similar complexity and look at signals on both for comparison. Better still, the "bullshit" statements would be derived from mixing words from the "non-bullshit" statement pool.

wbillingsley 10y ago
Funny you should mention that, as I believe it's covered in the author's follow-on research paper "Misperceiving Bullshit as Profoud is Associated with Peer-Reviewers of Politically-Oriented plosOne Articles"
- notahacker 10y ago
  My favourite Onion-worthy line from the article was "research on bullshit is still in its infancy".
tommorris 10y ago
A much better paper came out last year that used tweets from Deepak Chopra and quotes from a random "new age wisdom" generator. PDF: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf And there's some followups... Dalton 2016 - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf Reply from Pennycook et al. - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf
- algorias 10y ago
  I had to chuckle at this passage from the first link: > participants were shown a list of activities (e.g., biking, reading) directly below the following instructions: “Below is a list of leisure activities. If you are reading this, please choose the “other” box below and type in ‘I read the instructions’”. This attention check proved rather difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing The perils of using poorly compensated students for your studies!

return0 10y ago

It's very bad for PLoS to use these clickbaity titles.

JasonSage 10y ago
What title would you use instead?
- return0 10y ago
  "Mechanical Turk users who favor conservatives are more receptive to high-BSR statements."

thaw13579 10y ago

It's not discussed in the paper, but another important point is line between lies and bullshit, and the reality distorting effects of BS: "For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off. … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are." https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar

humanrebar 10y ago
I just commented elsewhere, but the Trump University suits are fraud suits. They're exactly about bullshit and lying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University
- thaw13579 10y ago
  Didn't mean to imply that bullshit excludes lying, just that bullshit instead erodes the concept of truth in people's minds. Thankfully there are laws and records that are less easily eroded...

mikehall314 10y ago

The original source for the pseudo-profound bullshit seems to be http://wisdomofchopra.com/ http://wisdomofchopra.com/

shiftoutbox 10y ago

This is deep

jkldotio 10y ago

Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard. "The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0] How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large. [0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-... [1] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amazon-mechanical-turk-workers/ http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amaz...

mistermann 10y ago
Not saying you should draw any conclusions from this, but something I noticed: "Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is avoided [6,7]" [5] leads to: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003596 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909... Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism. It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left-leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's righteousness.

xmlblog 10y ago

"It may be that this finding and the present research in general has an impact on some conservatives in that they might evaluate statements more critically. We invite individuals to start with the present contribution." (emphasis mine)

JulianMorrison 10y ago

This needs to be very careful to avoid the mistake of taking "a sentence disagrees with science" as equivalent to "a sentence is pseudo profound bullshit" or you will get results that simply divide people into belief clades some of which are scientific and some of which are not. An example, if I were to say, "a daily routine of banishing prevents the accumulation of low-level negative entities" that would be starkly in disagreement with science and a true statement in the belief system of western occult magic. Unless of course you simply wish to detect scientificness versus not, and label the whole of "not" as bullshit.

NoGravitas 10y ago
Can you recommend a good daily routine of banishing? My cubicle seems to be accumulating low-level negative entities.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  The LBRP is reputed to be good.

hellofunk 10y ago

It's also true that oftentimes ideas that are truly profound are instead perceived as bullshit.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DonHopkins 10y ago
But it's extremely rare for a presidential candidate to ever make a truly profound statement. One exception is Mike Gravel's performance art piece [1], and his after-the-fact explanation of it that he gave later [2]. "I figured out that this is a metaphor. That one is focusing on one life. And then you turn around, throw a rock. That creates ripples. And then you go off to your demise. And lo and behold, the drop in the water becomes our logo." [1] Mike Gravel - Rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8 [2] Mike Gravel Explains The Rock Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY

Lxr 10y ago

This is funny and all but I fear their accepting articles like this damages the cause for PLoS long term. OA journals already have enough trouble with reputation and prestige, which is the main reason Elsevier et al are still in business, and articles like this (and there are too many examples IMO) don't really help.

mineshaftgap 10y ago

"Terrorism has nothing to do with Islam". Would that be considered bullshit?

guscost 10y ago

This is a classic psychology journal ad-hominem: https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hominem/ https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hom...

mjpuser 10y ago

Jason Silva is bullshit. The League on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s Jason silva on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA

alva 10y ago
My life is slightly worse having watched those videos

nanis 10y ago

> we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for an online survey. I guess one can publish this kind of bullshit in Psychology journals. There is a crucial difference between experimental economics, and psychology. In economics experiments, participants get paid based on their performance. In this context, that would translate to one's payoff being determined by how well one distinguishes between bullshit and mundane statements. When people get rewarded the same regardless of their responses, things tend to get dominated by people who are there to do the bare minimum, and get paid. My gut feeling is that it is far more likely for participants who do not take the survey seriously to report supporting those Republican candidates. After all, participants also live in the same world, and they bring in all sorts of baggage which this study does nothing to control.

randogp 10y ago

Apparently, in the article's comment section the word "bullshit" triggers a profanity filter. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F01a8325f-089b-434b-badd-7d9b99dadfd0 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Ad...

massysett 10y ago

I now know to ignore anything from plos.org, thanks.

eggman 10y ago

perspective is crucial; this conflict will continue

dspeyer 10y ago

They don't mention Researcher Allegiance Effect. Therefore I suspect they did nothing about it. Given the nature of the study, I feel comfortable ignoring the results on that alone, without bothering to find specific methodological flaws.

siegecraft 10y ago

I wonder what misperceiving the bullshit that is this study as profound says about someone.

billhendricksjr 10y ago
That's precisely what makes this article brilliant on multiple levels. I'm a hard core lefty who thinks the Dems are too conservative and I'm laughing with the paper and at myself.

newesthn 10y ago

This is a correlation Bullshit study.

newesthn 10y ago

This is a correlation study on Bullshit.

ghufran_syed 10y ago

Alternative hypotheses regarding the 'misperceiving [random] statements as profound ' group: maybe the group is: 1) more polite? 2) more efficient? (less time wasted on the task - more money per unit time) 3) more fond of poetry? 4) more religious? I think this last would be an interesting hypothesis to test, but like the authors, I have NO evidence that would support any of these hypotheses. However, unlike the authors, it appears I recognize that there is a lack of evidence :)