Page:On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.pdf/7

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

Table 2: Pearson product-moment correlations (Study 2). BSR = Bullshit Receptivity scale; H&B = Heuristics and Biases; NFC = Need for Cognition; FI = Faith in Intuition; Num. = Numeracy; VI = Verbal Intelligence; APM = Advanced Progressive Matrices; OC = Ontological Confusions; RB = Religious Belief; PB = Paranormal Belief. Bottom diagonal = full sample (N = 187). Top diagonal = Participants with knowledge of Deepak Chopra excluded (N = 102). Cronbach’s alphas for the full sample are reported in brackets. ∗∗∗ p < .001, ∗∗ p < .01, ∗ p < .05.



9.3Procedure

In contrast to Study 1, participants evaluated the meaningless statements before completing the cognitive tasks. Moreover, the Chopra-Twitter items followed directly after the meaningless statements. We asked participants if they knew who Deepak Chopra is (yes / maybe / no) and, if so, whether they follow him on “Twitter” or have read any of his books. The cognitive tasks were then completed in the following order: heuristics and biases battery, Wordsum, numeracy, and APM. Participants then completed the ontological confusions scale, followed by the religious and paranormal belief scales (in that order). The NFC and FI questionnaires came at the very end of the study.

Of the 187 participants, 85 (45.5%) indicated that they know who Deepak Chopra is (“uncertain”: N = 26, 13.9%; “no”: N = 76, 40.6%). This knowledge was associated with lower profoundness ratings for the pseudo-profound bullshit items (“no/maybe” M = 2.6; “yes” M = 2.3), t(185) = 2.84, SE = .11, p = .005, and Chopra-Twitter items (“no/maybe” M = 2.9; “yes” M = 2.6), t(185) = 2.32, SE = .12, p = .022. Below we report key analyses with the full and restricted (i.e., those with knowledge of Chopra being excluded) samples.

Focusing on the full sample, the 20-item BSR scale had excellent internal consistency (α = .93) and the 10-item Chopra-Twitter scale was also reliable (α = .89). A summary of descriptive statistics for each item is reported in Table S2. Participants rated the Chopra-Twitter items (M = 2.77, SD = .84) as more profound than the bullshit statements (M = 2.46, SD = .76), participant-level: t(187) = 10.6, SE = .03, p < .001, item-level: t(28) = 3.98, SE = .08, p < .001. However, mean ratings for the two scales were very strongly correlated (r = .88). Moreover, the pattern of correlations for the scales was identical (see supplementary materials, Table S3). We therefore combined all of the items for both scales into a single Bullshit Receptivity (BSR) scale, which had excellent internal consistency (α = .96).

The BSR scale significantly correlated with each variable apart from Need for Cognition (Table 2, bottom diagonal), which (curiously) was only modestly correlated with heuristics and biases performance. Specifically, BSR was negatively correlated with performance on the heuristics and biases battery and positively correlated with Faith in Intuition. The cognitive ability measures, including numeracy, were also negatively correlated with BSR. Finally, BSR was positively correlated with ontological confusions, and both religious and paranormal belief. The pattern of results was very similar when the correlations are restricted only to participants who did not report having any knowledge of Deepak Chopra (Table 2, top diagonal).

In Studies 1 and 2, we established a statistically reliable measure of bullshit receptivity that correlated with a variety of conceptually related variables. It remains unclear, however, whether these associations are driven by a bias toward accepting pseudo-profound bullshit as meaningful or a failure to detect the need for skepticism (or both) when skepticism is warranted (i.e., sensitivity, as distinct from bias,