How good are you at detecting bullshit? If you think the answer is very, a new study suggests you might actually be bullshitting yourself after finding what they call the “BS blind spot”. The team found that people that believe they are the best at detecting “pseudo-profound bullshit” were actually often the worst, while people that underestimated their abilities were typically the best.
The results suggest that those that believe highly of themselves in this regard might be the biggest culprits for spreading misinformation.
“My co-authors and I recently published a study examining whether people who spread misinformation are also more likely to fall for it – that is, whether one can ‘bullshit a bullshitter’ and one of the main implications of that work suggests that people who intentionally spread misinformation in some situations can also unintentionally spread it without realizing it in other situations,” Shane Littrell, PhD, co-author of the study, told Psypost.
“To me, this seemed to suggest that some people who knowingly spread bullshit are unaware of the fact that they often fall for it themselves, possibly because they think they’re better at detecting it than everyone else.”
To investigate people’s ability to spot waffle, the researchers carried out two studies involving 412 participants. The first study involved 20 statements, many of which were intended to sound a lot more philosophical than they actually were and contained a lot of buzzwords. For example, one statement was this little masterpiece: “We are in the midst of a high‐frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.” Truly thought-provoking.
The rest of the statements came from famous quotes that were generally accepted as profound. The participants had to rate each one on how profound they were on a scale of 1-5, while also providing an estimate of how good they think they are at detecting bullshit. Each person also judged others on how well they think the others are at perceiving bullshit, for added fun.
They found that the people that failed the most at detecting bullshit generally scored themselves higher at being able to spot it, while also rating themselves higher than others. Meanwhile, the people that were the best rated themselves amongst the worst – it turns out that having some humility is good for cutting through the bullshit. The researchers dubbed this the “bullshit blind spot”, where it seems we’re talking rubbish no matter how good we think we are.
The second study found that when participants were identifying or falling for bullshit, it was because of both intuitive and reflective thinking, not just one thinking process. It isn’t that one group of people are too instinctive and fall headfirst into the bullshit, it’s that they are overall more susceptible.
The team hoped to mimic social media and other scenarios you may encounter bullshit, but the isolated test may not accurately reflect how the participants would perform when out in the real world. Still, it gives good insights into humility and what we perceive of our own intelligence.
So, next time you see some extremely “profound” quote with a lot of buzzwords, take a second look to see whether it’s truly profound, or just absolute bullshit.
The study was published in the journal Thinking and Reasoning.
Source Link: Are You Good At Spotting Bullshit Or Do You Have "Bullshit Blindsight"?
