Page:On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.pdf/5

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

Table 1: Pearson product-moment correlations (Study 1; N = 279). BSR = Bullshit Receptivity scale; CRT = Cognitive Reflection Test. Cronbach’s alphas are reported in brackets. ∗∗∗ p < .001, ** p < .01, ∗ p < .05.

[[File:On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit Table 1.png|center|Gordon Pennycook et al 2015 On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit Judgment and Decision Making 10(6) 549-563 : Society for Judgment and Decision Making http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

Author Affiliation Department of Psychology University of Waterloo

gpennyco@uwaterloo.ca]]

eral Social Survey (starting in 1974). The Wordsum measure had acceptable reliability (α = .65). We also assessed numeracy using a 3-item measure (Schwartz, Woloshin, Black & Welch, 1997). The frequently used 3-item numeracy scale is strongly related to an expanded and more difficult 7-item numeracy scale, suggesting that both scales loaded on a single construct (labelled “global numeracy” by Lipkus, Samsa, and Rimer, 2001). However, we employed the shorter 3-item version for expediency, but it did not achieve acceptable reliability (α = .47).

We used a 14-item ontological confusions scale (Lindeman & Aarnio, 2007; Lindeman, et al., 2008; Svedholm & Lindeman, 2013), translated into English from Finnish. Participants were given the following instructions: “Do you think the following statements can be literally true, the way a sentence such as ‘Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player’ is true? Or are they true only in a metaphorical sense, like the expression ‘Friends are the salt of life’?”. They were then presented items such as “A rock lives for a long time” and asked to rate how metaphorical/literal the statement is on the following scale: 1= fully metaphorical, 2 = more metaphorical than literal, 3 = in between, 4 = more literal than metaphorical, 5 = fully literal. Those who rate the statements as more literal are considered more ontologically confused. Participants were also given 3 metaphors (e.g., “An anxious person is a prisoner to their anxiety”) and 3 literal statements (e.g., “Flowing water is a liquid”) as filler items that did not factor into the mean ontological confusion score. The ontological confusions scale had acceptable internal consistency (α = .74).

Finally, participants completed an 8-item religious belief questionnaire (Pennycook et al., 2014). Participants were asked to rate their level of agreement/disagreement (1 – strongly disagree to 5 – strongly agree) with 8 commonly held religious beliefs (afterlife, heaven, hell, miracles, angels, demons, soul, Satan). The scale had excellent internal consistency (α = .94).

6.3Procedure

Following a short demographic questionnaire, participants completed the tasks in the following order: heuristics and biases battery, Wordsum, numeracy, CRT2, CRT1, ontological confusion scale, bullshit receptivity, and religious belief questionnaire.

The Bullshit Receptivity (BSR) scale had good internal consistency (α = .82). A summary of descriptive statistics for each item and the full BSR scale is reported in Table S1. The mean profoundness rating was 2.6, which is in-between “somewhat profound” and “fairly profound” on the 5-point scale. Indeed, the mean profoundness rating for each item was significantly greater than 2 (“somewhat profound”), all t’s > 5.7, all p’s < .001, indicating that our items successfully elicited a sense of profoundness on the aggregate. Moreover, only 18.3% (N = 51) of the sample had a mean rating less than 2. A slight majority of the sample’s mean ratings fell on or in-between 2 and 3 (54.5%, N = 152) and over a quarter of the sample (27.2%, N = 76) gave mean ratings higher than 3 (“fairly profound”). These results indicate that our participants largely failed to detect that the statements are bullshit.

Next we investigate the possible association between reflective thinking and bullshit receptivity. Pearson productmoment correlations can be found in Table 1. BSR was strongly negatively correlated with each cognitive measure except for numeracy (which was nonetheless significant). Furthermore, both ontological confusions and religious belief were positively correlated with bullshit receptivity.

In Study 1, at least some participants appeared to find meaning in a series of statements that contained a random collec-