Does America Have a Problem With 'Bullshit Receptivity'?

Source: pxfuels

"Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation.”
—It’s Bad For Ya, George Carlin

This is Part 2 of "The Psychology of Bullshit." If you haven't read Part 1, "The Psychology of Bullshit," which defines "bullshit" in psychological terms and reviews research on "bullshit receptivity," please go back and start there.

Political Bullshit

When Dr. Harry Frankfurt described the ubiquity of bullshit in the 1980s, he attributed much of it to the deliberate and painstaking efforts of ad men and politicians:

“The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who—with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth—dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right. Yet there is something more to be said about this. However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something.”¹

Political bullshit seems even more relevant in today’s digital landscape, with politicians often pressured for comments on a wide range of subjects for which they often lack true expertise, and their comments often rapidly becoming internet memes. Frankfurt’s phrase “trying to get away with something” highlights how bullshit exists alongside intentional lying on a spectrum of political propaganda tools.

For political psychology, bullshit receptivity is probably as good a marker for susceptibility to propaganda as any. Unfortunately, the BRS may not adequately capture receptiveness to the kind of bullshit often encountered in politics. Unlike pseudoprofound bullshit, political bullshit isn’t designed to sound profound so much as it’s deliberately crafted as accessible if vague rhetoric to be used in speeches or off-the-cuff press conference remarks in the service of evading a more nuanced discussion of complex topics. Political bullshit is therefore often a smokescreen, either to cover for ignorance or to avoid conceding that one might be wrong.

In order to quantify bullshit that might be more relevant to politics and other domains, researchers from Slovakia have developed the General Bullshit Receptivity Scale (GBRS) to measure receptivity to “non-transcendental” bullshit across politics, health, relationships, and emotions. It asks respondents to rate the perceived truthfulness, likeability, and profoundness of questions like “detox is the process of cleansing the mind of toxic thoughts” and “a salary is payment for doing what we would not do for free.” Research using the GBRS found that it is correlated with the BSR and like the BSR, is in turn correlated with endorsement of conspiracy theories, paranormal beliefs, and other pseudoscience beliefs.¹⁷

These findings suggest that bullshit receptivity might represent a kind of generalized gullibility, with some evidence indicating that gullible individuals have greater susceptibility to general bullshit than pseudoprofound bullshit. This may explain why so many people are vulnerable to political propaganda today.

Calling Bullshit

If analytic thinking is the antithesis of bullshit receptivity, then teaching bullshit detection may be our best path to salvation. But analytic thinking is also the opposite of intuitive thinking, so it isn’t automatic or easy. It requires instruction to learn and deliberate practice to master. More precisely, teaching analytic thinking—like teaching the scientific method—means that we have to help people unlearn our more reflexive patterns of information processing and belief formation. In that sense, the road to salvation will likely be a long and hard one.

In much the same way, Brandonlini’s Law, also known as the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” holds that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [what’s needed] to produce it.” This truism highlights that while the battle against misinformation more generally must be fought “face to face,” the larger war against belief in misinformation won’t be won without prevention. Once people are set in their ways, beliefs are notoriously hard to change. Building immunity against false beliefs in the first place is the more effective long-term strategy.

Almost 20 years before Dr. Frankfurt, and half a century before now, the late NYU professor Neil Postman gave a talk entitled, “Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection” at the 1969 National Convention for Teachers of English in Washington DC. He started by telling his audience that “helping kids to activate their crap-detectors should take precedence over any other legitimate educational aim.” Half a century later, his conclusion of both pessimism and hope suggests that little progress has been made and that much still needs to be done:

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“… I said at the beginning that I thought there is nothing more important than for kids to learn how to identify fake communication. You, therefore, probably assume that I know something about now to achieve this. Well, I don’t. At least not very much. I know that our present curricula do not even touch on the matter. Neither do our present methods of training teachers. I am not even sure that classrooms and schools can be reformed enough so that critical and lively people can be nurtured there. For all I know, there may be so few [teachers] interested in the matter that it is hardly worth talking about. Nonetheless, I persist in believing that it is not beyond your profession to invent ways to educate youth along these lines.”

Fortunately, a few such efforts are now underway. A few years ago, University of Washington professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West started teaching “data reasoning in a digital world” within a college course they called “Calling Bullshit.” They then launched the Calling Bullshit website and have a book with the same title due out later this summer.

In their website’s FAQ page, Drs. Bergstrom and West explain the motivation behind their efforts:

“We have a civic motivation … It's not a matter of left- or right-wing ideology; both sides of the aisle have proven themselves facile at creating and spreading bullshit. Rather (and at the risk of grandiose language) adequate bullshit detection strikes us as essential to the survival of liberal democracy. Democracy has always relied on a critically-thinking electorate, but never has this been more important than in the current age of false news and international interference in the electoral process via propaganda disseminated over social media.”

While Calling Bullshit may be just what America needs, it’s only one college course at one university. If we are to win the war against belief in misinformation and our collective appetite for bullshit, courses like this should be offered not only in universities, but in scaled-down versions starting in elementary school and extending through high school.

At the same time, like so many modern problems, we cannot place our hopes for the future entirely within the next generation. Education in school is too often undone in the home. Unless we all work on developing our powers of discernment, learning to separate reliable information from crap, the bullshit will continue to pile up.