The authors clearly had a lot of fun writing their paper on the reception and detection of BS. They use the term “bullshit” more in the first few paragraphs than most people use their core term in the whole of any paper. That said, why not? It is an interesting and important topic. Do people spot vacuous pseudo-profound nonsense or not? What then is the the science of spotting BS?
Defining The Term
Starting with a definition they argue that the idea of BS as simple rubbish or nonsense isn’t enough. There must be the desire to be seen as saying something meaningful. Part of the goals and intentions of the communicator must be to seem meaningful. They restrict their focus to pseudo-profound bullshit, rather than big fish stories. They worry Twitter especially with its character limit, (which was then 140) encourages pithy nonsense that authors want readers to take seriously.
The authors aimed to test what predicted who spotted the pseudo-profound nonsense. To this end they ran a series of 4 experiments. (Including the first experiment where 35% of participants failed a simple attention check. This is not a great sign of focus although apparently attention didn’t impact the results).
The Science Of Spotting BS
So who was receptive to bullshit?
Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
Pennycook et al. 2015, page 559
That many people — all of us sometimes I’m sure — accept pseudo-profound nonsense from charlatans is a worry. I’m not sure what exactly we can do about it. Still, at least these authors clearly had a great time digging into the science of spotting bs.
For more on bs see here.
Read: Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang (2015) On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563