Page:On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.pdf/12

Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015

As a secondary point, it is worthwhile to distinguish uncritical or reflexive open-mindedness from thoughtful or reflective open-mindedness. Whereas reflexive openmindedness results from an intuitive mindset that is very accepting of information without very much processing, reflective open-mindedness (or active open-mindedness; e.g., Baron, Scott, Fincher & Metz, 2014) results from a mindset that searches for information as a means to facilitate critical analysis and reflection. Thus, the former should cause one to be more receptive of bullshit whereas the latter, much like analytic cognitive style, should guard against it.

The foregoing highlights what appears to be a strong general susceptibility to bullshit, but what cognitive mechanisms inoculate against bullshit? Drawing on recent dualprocess theories that posit a key role for conflict detection in reasoning (De Neys, 2012; Pennycook et al., 2015), we proposed that people may vary in their ability to detect bullshit. Our results modestly support this claim. Namely, we created a bullshit “sensitivity” measure by subtracting profundity ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit from ratings for legitimate motivational quotations. Increased bullshit sensitivity was associated with better performance on measures of analytic thinking. This is consistent with Sagan’s (1996) famous claim that critical thinking facilitates “baloney detection”.

Further, bullshit sensitivity was associated with lower paranormal belief, but not conspiratorial ideation or acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine. This was not predicted as all three forms of belief are considered “epistemically suspect” (e.g., Pennycook, et al., in press). One possible explanation for this divergence is that supernatural beliefs are a unique subclass because they entail a conflict between some immaterial claim and (presumably universal) intuitive folk concepts (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). For example, the belief in ghosts conflicts with folk-mechanics – that is intuitive belief that objects cannot pass through solid objects (Boyer, 1994). Pennycook et al. (2014) found that degree of belief in supernatural religious claims (e.g., angels, demons) is negatively correlated with conflict detection effects in a reasoning paradigm. This result suggests that the particularly robust association between pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity and supernatural beliefs may be because both response bias and conflict detection (sensitivity) support both factors. Further research is needed to test this claim.

17.2Future directions

The focus of this work was on investigating individual differences in the tendency to accept bullshit statements, and our initial evidence indicates that reflectiveness may be a key individual difference variable. At a very basic level, the willingness to stop and think analytically about the actual meanings of the presented words and their associations would seem an a priori defense against accepting bullshit at face value (i.e., to avoid an excessively open-minded response bias). Moreover, increased detection of bullshit may reinforce a critical attitude and potentially engender a more restrained attitude to profundity judgments. The present findings also provide evidence that an increased knowledge of word meaning (via verbal intelligence) may assist in critical analysis. An understanding of more precisely nuanced meanings of words may reveal inconsistencies, incongruities, and conflicts among terms in bullshit statements. Conflict detection is a key aspect of dual-process theories (e.g., De Neys, 2012; Pennycook, et al., 2015), though in this case it remains unclear precisely what features of bullshit statements might cue reflective thinking. What is it about a statement like “good health imparts reality to subtle creativity” that might cause someone to stop and consider the meaning of the sentence more deeply?

Although a reflective thinking style appears to militate against bullshit acceptance, other cognitive processes that underlie the propensity to find meaning in meaningless statements remain to be elucidated. It may be that people naturally assume that statements presented in a psychology study (vague or otherwise) are constructed with the goal of conveying some meaning. Indeed, the vagueness of the statements may imply that the intended meaning is so important or profound that it cannot be stated plainly (Sperber, 2010). In the current work, we presented the participants with meaningless statements without cueing them to the possibility that they are complete bullshit. Although this is likely how bullshit is often encountered in everyday life, it may be that some skepticism about the source of the statement is the key force that may guard against bullshit acceptance. For example, poems attributed to prestigious sources are evaluated more positively (Bar-Hillel, Maharshak, Moshinsky & Nofech, 2012). Interpretation is difficult and humans surely rely on simple heuristics (e.g., “do I trust the source?”) to help with the task.

In this vein, psychological research should aim to elucidate contextual factors that interact with individual differences in the reception and detection of bullshit. As noted by philosophers studying the topic, the bullshitter oft has the intention of implying greater meaning than is literally contained in the message, though the nature of the intent can vary. For example, the literary critic Empson (1947) describes the use of ambiguity in literature, including a type of intentional ambiguity used by poets in which a passage “says nothing, by tautology, by contradiction, or by irrelevant statements; so that the reader is forced to invent statements of his own. . . ” (p. 176). The employment and reception of such literary devices in the context of a broader meaningful work seems related to but dissociable from isolated statements such as those used here. By examining pseudo-profound bullshit in an empirical fashion, we set the stage for further refinement of this important conceptual