The Psychology of Bullshit

Source: Doug Beckers/Flickr (edited)

“One man’s bullshit is another man’s catechism.” —“Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection,” Neil Post

What Is Bullshit and Why Is There So Much of It?

With his 1986 essay “On Bullshit,”¹ Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt gave birth to bullshit as a topic of serious academic inquiry.

What is bullshit exactly? In technical terms, it has been defined as “communications that result from little to no concern for truth, evidence and/or established semantic, logical, systemic, or empirical knowledge.”² Put more simply, bullshit is “something that implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth.”³

So bullshitting isn’t just nonsense. It’s constructed in order to appear meaningful, though on closer examination, it isn’t. And bullshit isn’t the same as lying. A liar knows the truth but makes statements deliberately intended to sell people on falsehoods. bullshitters, in contrast, aren’t concerned about what’s true or not, so much as they’re trying to appear as if they know what they’re talking about. In that sense, bullshitting can be thought of as a verbal demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect—when people speak from a position of disproportionate confidence about their knowledge relative to what little they actually know, bullshit is often the result.

If that sounds all too familiar in today’s world, consider that Dr. Frankfurt’s 1986 essay (as well as his 2005 book of the same name) began with the claim that “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” More than 30 years later, that claim seems more relevant than ever now.

Wake Forest University psychologist John Petrocelli found evidence to support that beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect, bullshitting tends to happen when there’s social pressure to provide an opinion and a social “pass” that will allow someone to get away with it. Three decades ago, Dr. Frankfurt noted that such conditions were present in an America where people felt entitled if not obligated to offer “opinions about everything,” and politics in particular, and where objective reality was often denied in favor of voicing impassioned personal opinions.

Fast-forwarding to the “post-truth” world of 2020, where facts and expertise have been declared dead, opinions are routinely confused with news, and objective evidence is endlessly refuted, the case could be made that bullshit has reached epic proportions. In this regard, the contribution of the internet is hard to ignore. Psychology research from Dr. Matt Fisher and colleagues at Yale University demonstrated that the Dunning-Kruger effect is amplified by access to the internet—we tend to conflate the ability to look up information on the internet with actual personal knowledge.⁴ Social media also offers an environment that combines the social pressure to bullshit with an anonymity that provides the social “pass.” In 2018, education experts from Queen’s University in Belfast summed it up this way:

“…along with a pervasive and balkanized social media ecosystem and high internet immersion, public life provides abundant opportunities to bullshit and lie on a scale we could have scarcely credited 30 years ago.”⁵

Pseudoprofound Bullshit Receptivity and Its Implications

While Dr. Frankfurt sparked the academic study of bullshit and bullshitting, few have advanced our knowledge of “bullshittees”—those who consume bullshit—more than Regina University psychology professor Dr. Gordon Pennycook. He and his colleagues won an Ig Nobel Prize for developing a questionnaire designed to quantify receptiveness to a particular kind of bullshit that they called “pseudoprofound bullshit."

The Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BRS) asks respondents to rate the profoundness of “seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous” constructed from a random mash-up of words taken from Deepak Chopra’s tweets (e.g. “hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty”) and similar “profound-sounding words” from The New Age Bullshit Generator (e.g. “consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us”).⁵ This scale has revealed that the appeal of such seemingly profound, but actually meaningless statements varies across individuals as a continuous psychological trait that can be quantified.

Across various research studies, bullshit receptivity has been associated with paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs, belief in conspiracy theories, the tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things, and the tendency to perceive false or fake news as accurate as well as a willingness to share it on social media.^3,6-10 It’s inversely correlated with intelligence and analytical thinking.^3,9-11 Studies exploring associations between bullshit receptivity and political ideology have found positive correlations with certain aspects of political conservatism including support of conservative social policies, as well as favorable views of Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and President Trump.^12-14 However, bullshit receptivity is by no means a trait exclusive to conservatives—evidence from Sweden indicates correlation with Green Party affiliation.¹⁴ Behaviorally, higher bullshit receptivity has been associated with lower engagement in “prosocial” acts like donating to or volunteering for charity.¹⁵

Collectively, although correlation doesn’t equal causation, the early returns on bullshit receptivity research thus far suggest that receptivity to pseudoprofound bullshit is a tendency of those who think more intuitively than analytically. Stated another way, the opposite of bullshit receptivity—bullshit detection—seems to require active, deliberate reflection and analysis, rather than accepting things based on gut feeling. This requires considerable cognitive effort on our part, whereas bullshit receptivity may reflect a kind of cognitive laziness or, less pejoratively, a trap into which it’s all too easy for us to fall.¹⁶

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This means that we have a lot of work to do if we ever hope to free ourselves, and America, from bullshit. Please continue reading Part 2 of this series, "Does America Have a Problem With Bullshit Receptivity?" to find out how we can try.