Those Who Produce BS Are More Vulnerable to Others Who Do the Same

BS by Another Name.

Source: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Watch out, BSers: If you dish it out, you are more likely to fall for it in return.

So, at least, is the conclusion of new research by a team of psychologists at the University of Waterloo.

First, though, what is “bullshit”? I’m guessing we are all familiar with it. In fact, sometimes it can feel as if we are knee-deep in it. Here is the famous characterization offered by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt: “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

Following Frankfurt, BSing is not the same as lying. If you lie you care about the truth, but you are trying to get someone to believe something you consider false. “Did you eat the last cookie?” “No way." (Yes, I did.) “Do you like my new tie?" “I love it." (Actually, I hate it.)

A BSer, on the other hand, is just making things up. He could end up saying true things. He could end up saying false things. But the BSer doesn’t care about whether what he says is true or false, but rather whether it advances some other goal he has, such as making money or advancing a political agenda or increasing his number of followers on social media. To quote Frankfurt again, “the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.”

Think of the used car salesman who is spinning a story about how good the engine is in this car you are considering buying. He has no idea what he is talking about; he’s never even opened the hood. He’s just making it up to try to get a sale.

There is already a fair amount of empirical research on BSing, including the development of measures to tell who is higher or lower on this characteristic. What this new research from Shane Littrell, Evan F. Risko, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang of the University of Waterloo examined was not how to identify BSers or measure their effects on others. Rather, they wanted to test whether people who score high on their measure of BSing are also likely to be receptive to BS in turn. Or to put it more crudely, does the flow of BS tend to go in both directions?

Littrell and his colleagues focused on one type of BSing, what they call “persuasive bullshitting,” which is “motivated by a desire to impress or persuade others.” As an example, they mention, “when an executive makes vacuous, buzzword-heavy embellishments and empty proclamations in an attempt to impress co-workers or influence shareholders.” So the question becomes, do those who are high on persuasive BS production also tend to be high on its reception?

Littrell’s team ran three studies, and I will focus on the first one here: 261 online participants completed a series of surveys, randomly ordered. One was the Bullshitting Frequency Scale in which participants rated themselves on a 5-point scale from “Never” to “A lot/All the time” using 12 item such as: “When I want to contribute to a conversation or discussion even though I’m not well-informed on the topic.”

They were also given three measures of BS receptivity. For “pseudo-profound bullshit” participants had to rate on a 5-point scale how profound they found statements like the following: “We are in the midst of a high-frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.”

For “scientific bullshit” receptivity, they had to rate the truthfulness of statements like: “The entropy of an integral approaches constructive interference as its buoyancy approaches endothermal constant of quantum ground states.”

Finally, for “fake news” receptivity, they had to assess the accuracy of a series of news headlines, some of which were recent fake news stories as determined by Snopes.com. The results: Those higher on BS production were also higher on pseudo-profound BS, scientific BS, and fake news receptivity. Similar patterns emerged in their other two studies, which also included additional variables such as cognitive ability.

So it does seem as if those who are more likely to dish out BS are also more likely to take it in. An interesting further question is whether these individuals are aware of their high receptivity to (persuasive) BS. Littrell and his colleagues claim there is good initial evidence to think that they are often not aware of this, i.e., their BS detectors are not very reliable. If this is right, then we have a fascinating dynamic in operation whereby someone frequently engages in BSing, without at the same time appreciating how susceptible she is to it in turn. To take this even one more step further, what happens when such a person becomes aware of her susceptibility? Will that make her any less likely to produce BS in the future, if she doesn’t like how vulnerable she is to taking it in?

Let me end by noting that these findings are preliminary and suggestive. The number of participants in their studies was not that large, and questions can be raised about data collected from places like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participant pool. Not to mention that this is all self-reported data, and so we need to trust that what a survey says about someone’s degree of BS production, for instance, reliably reflects just how frequent a BSer he or she really is.

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But initially, at least, it appears that the expression, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter” might be, well, just more BS.