Page:On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.pdf/2

Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015 have been primarily concerned with the goals and intentions of the bullshitter, we are interested in the factors that predispose one to become or to resist becoming a bullshittee. Moreover, this sort of bullshit – which we refer to here as pseudo-profound bullshit – may be one of many different types. We focus on pseudo-profound bullshit because it represents a rather extreme point on what could be considered a spectrum of bullshit. We can say quite confidently that the above example (a) is bullshit, but one might also label an exaggerated story told over drinks to be bullshit. In future studies on bullshit, it will be important to define the type of bullshit under investigation (see Discussion for further comment on this issue).

Importantly, pseudo-profound bullshit is not trivial. For a real-world example of pseudo-profound bullshit and an application of our logic, consider the following:

""Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.""

This statement bears a striking resemblance to (a), but is (presumably) not a random collection of words. Rather, it is an actual "tweet" sent by Deepak Chopra, M.D., who has authored numerous books with titles such as Quantum Healing (Chopra, 1989) and The Soul of Leadership (Chopra, 2008) and who has been accused of furthering "woo-woo nonsense" (i.e., pseudo-profound bullshit; e.g., Shermer, 2010). The connection between (a) and (c) is not incidental, as (a) was derived using the very buzzwords from Chopra’s "Twitter" feed. The vagueness of (c) indicates that it may have been constructed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity at the expense of a clear exposition of meaning or truth.

Despite the lack of direct concern for truth noted by Frankfurt (2005), pseudo-profound bullshit betrays a concern for verisimilitude or truthiness. We argue that an important adjutant of pseudo-profound bullshit is vagueness which, combined with a generally charitable attitude toward ambiguity, may be exacerbated by the nature of recent media. As a prime example, the necessary succinctness and rapidity of "Twitter" (140 characters per "Tweet") may be particularly conducive to the promulgation of bullshit. Importantly, vagueness and meaning are, by definition, at cross purposes, as the inclusion of vagueness obscures the meaning of the statement and therefore must undermine or mask "deep meaning" (i.e., profundity) that the statement purports to convey. The concern for "profundity" reveals an important defining characteristic of bullshit (in general): that it attempts to impress rather than to inform; to be engaging rather than instructive.

What might cause someone to erroneously rate pseudo-profound bullshit as profound? In our view, there are two candidate mechanisms that might explain a general "receptivity" to bullshit. The first mechanism relates to the possibility that some people may have a stronger bias toward accepting things as true or meaningful from the outset. According to Gilbert (1991, following Spinoza), humans must first believe something to comprehend it. In keeping with this hypothesis, Gilbert, Tafarodi and Malone (1993) found that depleting cognitive resources caused participants to erroneously believe information that was tagged as false. This indicates that people have a response bias toward accepting something as true. This asymmetry between belief and unbelief may partially explain the prevalence of bullshit; we are biased toward accepting bullshit as true and it therefore requires additional processing to overcome this bias. Nonetheless, it should be noted that previous work on belief and doubt focused on meaningful propositions such as "The heart produces all mental activity." The startling possibility with respect to pseudo-profound bullshit is that people will first accept the bullshit as true (or meaningful) and, depending on downstream cognitive mechanisms such as conflict detection (discussed below), either retain a default sense of meaningfulness or invoke deliberative reasoning to assess the truth (or meaningfulness) of the proposition. In terms of individual differences, then, it is possible that some individuals approach pseudo-profound bullshit with a stronger initial expectation for meaningfulness. However, since this aspect of bullshit receptivity relates to one’s mindset when approaching (or being approached with) bullshit, it is therefore not specific to bullshit. Nonetheless, it may be an important component of bullshit receptivity. Put differently, some individuals may have an excessively "open" mind that biases them to make inflated judgments of profundity, regardless of the content.

The second mechanism relates to a potential inability to detect bullshit, which may cause one to confuse vagueness for profundity. In the words of Sperber (2010): "All too often, what readers do is judge profound what they have failed to grasp" (p. 583). Here, the bullshittee is simply unaware that the relevant stimulus requires special consideration. This mechanism is linked to what has been labelled as "conflict monitoring" failures (e.g., De Neys, 2014; Pennycook, Fugelsang & Koehler, 2015). In the context of reasoning research, for example, conflict monitoring is necessary when two sources of information in a problem cue conflicting responses (e.g., logical validity and conclusion believability in a syllogism). Recent research indicates that people are capable of detecting these sorts of conflicts (see De Neys, 2012 for a review), but that conflict monitoring failures are nonetheless an important source of bias in reasoning and decision making (Pennycook, Fugelsang & Koehler,