"Generally, in line with the findings of Pennycook et al., we found that religiosity correlated positively with a tendency to perceive meaningfulness in bullshit sentences."

Admit it, you were biting your fingernails and were waiting for this study. Guess what, the wait is over.

This is a highly recommended paper about bullshit sensitivity, sort of for intellectuals who inhabit the fringes of The Far Side.

To be sure, it does not deal with ordinary bullshit like the one politicians base their whole career on, this is about "pseudo-profound bullshit". Economists spring to mind.

As is mandatory for any serious and meaningful scientific study a definition is needed. Here it is:

"Seemingly impressive statements that are presented as meaningful or true but are actually vacuous (e.g. “Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity”) have been called pseudo-profound bullshit. Bullshit-statements are (a) constructed absent any concern for the truth and (b) do not consistently have any unambiguous meaning."

Good, now it needs to be remembered that in any form of communication we need to distinguish carefully between

Bullshit-receptivity, profoundness-receptivity and bullshit-sensitivity 

As noted by Pennycook and colleagues [1], the tendency to perceive bullshit sentences as meaningful, which is called bullshit-receptivity, is different from bullshit-sensitivity, which refers to the ability to distinguish bullshit sentences from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence”). Perceived meaningfulness ofgenuinely profound sentences and bullshit sentences are generally positively related (e.g. r = .38 and r = .43 in [1]; and r = .52 in [6]), which means that bullshit-receptivity could reflect either a general inclination to perceive any sentence or statement as meaningful or a propensity to perceive specifically bullshit sentences as meaningful. Bullshit-sensitivity, on the other hand, represents the ability to tell apart the pseudo-profound from the actually profound. In Pennycook’s original article [1], two of the four studies included bullshit-sensitivity calculated by subtracting bullshit-receptivity from profoundness-receptivity (i.e. the perceived meaningfulness ofgenuinely profound sentences), and although it was associated with lower paranormal belief, the results regarding bullshit-sensitivity were less conclusive than those regarding bullshit-receptivity. Because there are inherent scaling problems with variables made out ofdifference-scores [9], we opted to focus on bullshit-receptivity and profoundnessreceptivity in the analyses, inferring bullshit-sensitivity indirectly. If both bullshit- and profoundness-receptivity are positively (or negatively) associated with e.g. prosocial behavior, this suggests that it is the general inclination to perceive anything as meaningful that relates to prosocial behavior. On the contrary, if bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity predict prosocial behavior in opposite directions, this suggests that it is the ability to distinguish bullshit from the actually profound (i.e. bullshit-sensitivity) that relates to prosocial behavior.

You are all set now and ready to go.

Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

Arvid Erlandsson, Artur Nilsson, Gustav Tinghög, Daniel Västfjäll

Abstract

Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

Discussion 

This study is the first to demonstrate that individual differences in how people react to pseudo-profound bullshit statements and to actually profound statements predict their behavior. People with high bullshit-receptivity (i.e. those who find pseudo-profound bullshit statements such as “the unexplainable touches on the inherent experiences ofthe universe” to be highly meaningful) were overall less likely to engage in prosocial behavior than people with low bullshit-receptivity. Conversely, people with high profoundness-receptivity (i.e. those who think that actually profound statements such as “your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in” are highly meaningful), were overall more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than those with low profoundness-receptivity. 

This pattern emerged both when prosocial behavior was assessed in terms ofparticipants’ self-reported donation experience (whether or not they have donated to charity in the past year) and, even clearer, when it was measured in terms ofparticipants’ likelihood to volunteer in order to raise money to charity. For the most part, it also held up well when controlling for potential intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, education, religiosity, age, and time spent completing the survey. In addition to this, the fact that we had over a thousand participants from a roughly nationally representative Swedish sample, gives us further reason to think that the obtained relations between bullshit- and profoundness-receptivity and prosocial behavior are robust and generalizable. 

The take-home message of this article is that although bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity were positively correlated with each other, they yet correlated in opposite directions with prosocial behavior, which suggests that it is primarily individual differences in bullshit-sensitivity (the ability to distinguish the pseudo-profound from the actually profound), and not individual differences in the propensity to perceive any given sentence as meaningful, that positively predict prosocial behavior.

Pdf is highly recommended.