On Bullshit

[Spice_Weasel]

I know it’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I stumbled across this journal article today and thought of ya’ll:

On the detection and reception of pseudo-profound bullshit

Four studies on the human propsensity to rate bullshit as profound. Among other things, they created a Deepak Chopra scale, which cracks my ass up.

…In addition to the 10 meaningless statements used in Study
1, we obtained 10 novel items from http://wisdomofchopra.
com and New-Age Bullshit Generator. As noted, we also
obtained 10 items from Deepak Chopra’s Twitter feed
(x.com; e.g. “Nature is a selfregulating
ecosystem of awareness”).

The results are perhaps, not surprising.

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.

As a secondary point, it is worthwhile to distinguish
uncritical or reflexive open-mindedness from thoughtful
or reflective open-mindedness. Whereas reflexive openmindedness
results from an intuitive mindset that is very
accepting of information without very much processing, re-
flective open-mindedness (or active open-mindedness; e.g.,
Baron, Scott, Fincher & Metz, 2014) results from a mindset
that searches for information as a means to facilitate critical
analysis and reflection. Thus, the former should cause one
to be more receptive of bullshit whereas the latter, much like
analytic cognitive style, should guard against it

Maybe nothing groundbreaking here, but hey, at least someone is bothering to look into this important matter.

One of my favorite bits wrt methodology:

Participants were also given an
attention check. For this, participants were shown a list of
activities (e.g., biking, reading) directly below the following
instructions: “Below is a list of leisure activities. If you are
reading this, please choose the “other” box below and type
in ‘I read the instructions’”. This attention check proved
rather difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing (N = 99).

Happy Thursday!

[Gatopescado]

“On Bullshit, On Dancer, On Blitzen, On Prancer!”

Sorry. First thing that popped in my mind when I saw the title.

[jayrey]

I would love to know what 35.4% of the participants did instead of checking the “other” box and typing in “I read the instructions.” Seriously, how hard is that?

[Roderick_Femm]

@Spice_Weasel

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.

This part is not unexpected, but I know a person who is a complete outlier, the CIO at my former employer (one unit in a large corporation). Intensely practical, obviously bright, funny and charming, but she constantly posts on facebook woo of the type quoted above. I think she has some kind of disconnect between the real world that she can put her hands on, and her aspirations towards spirituality or something. I find it very jarring.

[Machine_Elf]

Reminds me of the Sokal affair - in which an author submitted an article composed entirely of bullshit to an academic journal, and it ended up getting published. Immediately after publication the author revealed the article to be bullshit, much to the embarrassment of the journal editors. I wonder how those editors would have fared as subjects of the OP’s study.

[Spice_Weasel]

@Machine_Elf

Reminds me of the Sokal affair - in which an author submitted an article composed entirely of bullshit to an academic journal, and it ended up getting published. Immediately after publication the author revealed the article to be bullshit, much to the embarrassment of the journal editors. I wonder how those editors would have fared as subjects of the OP’s study.

I would love to see a follow-up study about bullshit in academia. I did read about a study where peers deemed the more obfuscating academic papers to be of a higher quality than those with more simple language.

[Machine_Elf]

@Spice_Weasel

I would love to see a follow-up study about bullshit in academia. I did read about a study where peers deemed the more obfuscating academic papers to be of a higher quality than those with more simple language.

I suppose the original Saturn V blueprint seems a lot higher quality than XKCD’s Upgoer Five.

[eschereal]

I ran across this on a page that made the material a little more accessible. The researchers created a page that randomly generates a wad of convincing sounding new-agey bullshit. It kind of reminds me of the stuff I have seen periodically posted elsewhere (not SDMB) uttered by the ultimate con-man Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (I cannot/care not to remember the name he switched to). Utter vapid profundity.

Which makes me feel that our high schools ought to insert a Bullshit credit requirement for getting a diploma. Except, if they did that, this board would fade to a trickle of posts a day.

[cmkeller]

@Gatopescado

“On Bullshit, On Dancer, On Blitzen, On Prancer!”

Sorry. First thing that popped in my mind when I saw the title.

Ditto.

[jayrey]

@eschereal

The researchers created a page that randomly generates a wad of convincing sounding new-agey bullshit.

Oh. My. God. What a hoot! That is some funny stuff and sounds exactly like the kind of woo-bullshit my brother occasionally dispenses. Thanks for the laugh.

[zweisamkeit]

@jayrey

I would love to know what 35.4% of the participants did instead of checking the “other” box and typing in “I read the instructions.” Seriously, how hard is that?

Because they’re not paying attention to instructions, just skimming the question (or ignoring completely) and (randomly) selecting radio buttons.
I’ve participated in a bunch of studies that use these verifying-attention questions. Generally, you’ll click to “next page” a bunch of times; some pages have multiple questions and some will have only one. The attention question will be on its own page. At the top will be a 3-5 line paragraph of instructions like SpiceWeasel quoted (“Below you’ll read a question about blah. To show you’re paying attention, choose blah* [and usually type in “I have read the instructions”].”)" After a few line breaks, it presents the question like normal and the options.

People who are just going through to finish quickly won’t read the instructions. It’s fair to assume that it indicates the rest of their responses are similarly slapdash or random and their data can be removed from the actually useful data.

• might be one specific item when there’s a bunch and you can choose multiple options, or just “other”.

[jz78817]

the real question is why “horseshit” is worse than “bullshit.”

[zweisamkeit]

@jz78817

the real question is why “horseshit” is worse than “bullshit.”

My AP History teacher thought similarly. She had a doodle system when reading essays. If you were obviously *shitting, she’d doodle an animal in size order based on the level of *shit: Horse, then bull, then elephant . Woe betide anyone who earned an elephant!