Individual differences in receptivity to scientific bullshit

Abstract

Pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity is the tendency to perceive meaning in important-sounding, nonsense statements. To understand how bullshit receptivity differs across domains, we develop a scale to measure scientific bullshit receptivity — the tendency to perceive truthfulness in nonsensical scientific statements. Across three studies (total N = 1,948), scientific bullshit receptivity was positively correlated with pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity. Both types of bullshit receptivity were positively correlated with belief in science, conservative political beliefs, and faith in intuition. However, compared to pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity, scientific bullshit receptivity was more strongly correlated with belief in science, and less strongly correlated with conservative political beliefs and faith in intuition. Finally, scientific literacy moderated the relationship the two types of bullshit receptivity; the correlation between the two types of receptivity was weaker for individuals scoring high in scientific literacy.

Bullshit blind spots: the roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection

“…The propensity to give inflated positive judgments of qualities related to the persuasiveness (e.g., truthfulness, meaningfulness, likeability, etc.) of bullshit is known as one's bullshit receptivity (Evans et al, 2020;Littrell et al, 2021b;Pennycook et al, 2015a).…”

“…The remaining statements were randomly constructed from a list of New Age buzzwords and jargon by a computer algorithm to be syntactically correct but semantically meaningless, resulting in statements constructed without an intention to convey deep meaning or truth (i.e., "pseudoprofound bullshit"). Similar measures have been devised for assessing individual differences in receptivity to the perceived truthfulness of scientific bullshit (Evans et al, 2020), the meaningfulness of financial bullshit (Kienzler et al, 2022), and the likeability of general bullshit (Čavojová et al, 2020).…”

“…Higher scores on the BSR have been found to reliably predict greater acceptance of a broad range of epistemically-suspect beliefs associated with decreased Type II engagement, such as conspiracy theories, fake news, and scientific misinformation (Evans et al, 2020;Pennycook et al, 2015avan Prooijen et al, 2022). Bullshit receptivity is also positively associated with sharing misinformation online and greater engagement in persuasive bullshitting (Čavojová et al, 2019;Evans et al, 2020;Littrell et al, 2021b).…”

“…This suggests that overconfident reasoners may have diminished metacognitive insight for their own engagement in specific thinking processes. Moreover, a growing body of work has suggested that people who are more receptive to bullshit are less likely to engage in analytic thinking (Evans et al, 2020;Pennycook et al, 2015a;. If highly bullshit receptive people are prone to overestimating their actual bullshit detection ability, this may reflect a lack of insight into the thinking processes they utilize to evaluate and detect bullshit.…”

“…Given this current misinformation milieu, a growing body of work has emerged examining factors associated with the transmission and reception of misleading information, with particular attention paid to so-called "fake news" and various types of scientific, political, and pseudo-profound "bullshit" (e.g., Evans et al, 2020;Littrell, et al, 2021b;Petrocelli, 2021). Much of this research has focused on identifying specific cognitive factors common among people more susceptible to misleading information, finding negative relations between credulity for various types of bullshit with analytic thinking, open-minded cognition, intelligence, and metacognitive insight, to name a few (Bago, et al, 2020;De keersmaecker & Roets, 2017;Littrell et al, 2021b;.…”