Hunt & Associates P.C.

An Empirical Investigation on the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit – Really, We Did Not Make This Up!

RubbishThe Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada helped to fund a recently published study which reports “. . . four studies in which we ask participants to rate pseudo-profound bullshit and other statements on a profundity scale” in an effort “. . . to establish this as a legitimate measure of bullshit receptivity.”  The study, “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”, published in the Journal “Judgment and Decision Making”, vol. 10, no. 6, November 2015, pp. 549-563, used “ten novel meaningless statements . . . derived from two websites . . . to create a Bullshit Receptivity (BSR) scale.”  Among other sources, one study intentionally constructed “. . . meaningless statements with appropriate syntactic structure by randomly mashing together a list of words used in Deepak Chopra’s tweets. . . “.

As reported at Lowering the Bar, the study just received a 2016 Ig Nobel Prize from Improbable Research.

© 10/5/2016 Lawrence B. Hunt of Hunt & Associates, P.C.  All rights reserved.

 

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