Abstract
The bullshit receptivity scale—a methodological tool that measures the level of profoundness that participants assign to a series of obscure and new-agey, randomly generated statements—has become increasingly popular since its introduction in 2015. Researchers that deploy this scale often frame their research in terms of Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit, according to which bullshit is discourse produced without regard for the truth. I argue that framing these studies in Frankfurtian terms is detrimental and has led to some misguided theorizing about the mental processes implicated in bullshit receptivity. I argue that we should, instead, frame these studies in terms of what G.A. Cohen calls unclarifiable bullshit. After reviewing some recent theorizing about the psychology of bullshit receptivity, I show how reframing the bullshit receptivity scale in terms of unclarifiable bullshit generates plausible conjectures about the psychological factors responsible for bullshit receptivity. I draw from the literature on the illusion of explanatory depth and the misplaced meaning effect to develop a novel account of bullshit detection and receptivity. I consider some empirical support for my account and draw attention to ways that it can also be extended to account for results from studies that don’t use the bullshit receptivity scale.
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Notes
Studies 2 and 3 of Pennycook et al. (2015) also included some of pop-guru Deepak Chopra’s actual tweets (e.g., “Mechanics of Manifestation: Intention, detachment, centered in being allowing juxtaposition of possibilities to unfold”) because they were found to be psychometrically indistinguishable from the outputs of the random word generators. It’s worth flagging that Chopra’s tweets may not count as Frankfurtian bullshit because the tweets were, presumably, crafted with at least some regard for the truth. I won’t dwell on this issue, as these tweets comprise only a small portion of the BSR scale and have been excluded from some BSR studies. Additionally, the inclusion of these tweets sits well with the characterization of bullshit that I defend in section III.
One exception is Gligoric and Vilotijevic (2020), which investigated how manipulating the alleged source of BSR scale statements influences profundity ratings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that participants are more likely to rate bullshit statements as profound when the statements are attributed to the Dalai Lama or to Aristotle than when they are presented with no information about the author.
Thanks to Gordon Pennycook for bringing this data to my attention.
How, precisely, this “detection” works is a controversial topic (see De Neys 2022 for recent discussion of this issue). One possibility is that type 2 reasoning performs double duty, monitoring type 1 responses and facilitating slow, effortful thought when a type 1 response seems suspicious (Kahneman 2011). However, models of this sort seem to generate as many problems as they resolve because they need to specify how, precisely, this monitoring is achieved, without positing that type 2 processing is already fully active. One way of circumventing this problem is by holding that conflict occurs between multiple simultaneous type 1 responses, and this competition triggers effortful, deliberative processing (De Neys and Pennycook 2019, Pennycook 2023). While I think that models of this sort are plausible, nothing in this paper hangs on a specific articulation of dual process theory. The conclusions I argue for are consistent with a variety of dual process models.
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Wilson, J. Rethinking Bullshit Receptivity. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00701-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00701-0