Sounds Deep, Says Nothing: The Science of Bullshit Receptivity
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Before I get into this week's topic, I don't usually disclose how the sausage is made, but I need you, my loyal listeners, to know how many times I have tried to record this episode and have had to stop because I couldn't stop cracking up. So I'm going to do it one last time, and you may get me chuckling for some of these phrases because I cannot seem to help myself. See if I can stay professional on this take.
Leslie Poston:This week, we're talking about bullshit receptivity, which is exactly what it sounds like. And, yes, that's a real psychological construct with peer reviewed studies and everything. A study came out of Cornell recently that caught my attention. A cognitive psychologist named Shane Luttrell built a corporate bullshit generator, fed its output to over a thousand office workers, and asked them to rate the business savvy of statements like, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle to grave credentialing. He mixed those statements in with real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders and then gave everyone a battery of cognitive tests.
Leslie Poston:The punchline, the workers who thought the generated corporate jargon sounded like solid business strategy also scored the lowest on analytic thinking and workplace decision making. So if you've ever sat through a meeting wondering whether the person talking about synergizing cross functional paradigms had any idea what they were saying, science has your back. They probably didn't. And the colleagues nodding enthusiastically may be the worst decision makers in the room. That study sent me down a rabbit hole into about a decade of research on why some people are more susceptible to impressive sounding nonsense than others, how it connects to fake news and political propaganda, and why it ties directly into what we talked about last week with confident wrongness.
Leslie Poston:If that episode was about why we trust the wrong people, this one is about why we trust the wrong words. Let's stay with the Cornell study for just a moment and unpack some of the findings. Luttrell built his corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale across four studies. His generator churns out sentences that sound polished and professional, but that mean absolutely nothing. Things like by getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.
Leslie Poston:He measured how impressed people were by these statements and then cross referenced their scores with established cognitive tests. The workers who were most taken with the corporate BS also rated their supervisors as more charismatic and visionary. And they also reported higher job satisfaction and felt more inspired by their company's mission statements. On the surface, these sound like engaged, enthusiastic employees, but they also scored lower on cognitive reflection, fluid intelligence, and a test of effective workplace decision making. They were also more likely to spread the jargon themselves, which creates what Luttrell described as a feedback loop.
Leslie Poston:BS receptive employees elevate BS producing leaders who produce more BS, which rewards the people most impressed by it, who then rise in influence and keep the BS cycle going. His description of this dynamic as a clogged toilet of inefficiency is probably my favorite metaphor to come out of cognitive psychology so far this year. Luttrell pointed to two real world cases that showed this playing out. In 2009, a leaked Pepsi marketing presentation included language about the dynamic of perimeter oscillations and establishing a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression and became an industry wide joke. The more concerning example was a 2014 memo from a Microsoft executive that opened with 10 paragraphs of corporate jargon about device strategy and appropriate financial envelopes before getting to the actual news in paragraph 11.
Leslie Poston:12,500 people were about to lose their jobs. The Pepsi case was embarrassing, but the Microsoft one used meaningless language to hide meaningful consequences from thousands of people. The tendency to be impressed by empty language isn't something that only happened in conference rooms, though. Researchers have been studying it for over a decade, and it goes deeper than just bad PowerPoints. The origin of bullshit receptivity research goes back to 2015 at the University of Waterloo.
Leslie Poston:A team led by Gordon Pennyhook wanted to test something pretty straightforward. Can people tell when a statement that sounds profound is actually meaningless? That team built the original Bullshit Receptivity Scale using two online generators. One mashes up buzzwords from Deepak Chopra's Twitter feed into grammatically correct but semantically empty sentences. The other, which they called the New Age Bullshit Generator, does the same thing with a broader list of vague, profound sounding words.
Leslie Poston:He did statements like wholeness quiets infinite phenomena. And we are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself. Proper grammar? Sure. Zero meaning.
Leslie Poston:Participants rated how profound each statement was on a five point scale, and the average rating landed between somewhat profound and fairly profound. Over a quarter of participants averaged above fairly profound. Most people simply didn't detect that these statements were meaningless bullshit. What separated the people who caught it from those who didn't comes down to two cognitive tendencies. There's a well documented default in human cognition where you believe something before you evaluate it.
Leslie Poston:Your brain's starting position is acceptance, and it takes additional effort to override that and actually scrutinize what you're hearing. We've talked about that before. And then there's what we call a failure in conflict monitoring, where your brain doesn't flag that something deserves closer inspection. If a sentence is grammatically correct and uses words that individually sound meaningful, a lot of people's brains just wave it through without checking whether the words add up to an actual idea. Both of those connect to what we talked about last week with the Confidentialistic.
Leslie Poston:If something sounds like it should mean something, your brain's default is to accept that it does. This confident wrongness problem and the bullshit receptivity problem share the same root cause, skipping the step where you actually think about what you're hearing. In one case, you're producing information without checking it. In the other, you're consuming information without checking it. Same cognitive muscle, two different directions.
Leslie Poston:One finding that often gets lost when people hear about this research is that the participants who spotted the BS weren't cynics. They still rate it genuinely profound statements as profound. They could just tell the difference between real depth and fake depth. That's a useful correction to the assumption that being critical means being closed minded because the research shows the opposite. The people with the strongest BS filters also had the strongest appreciation for statements that actually meant something.
Leslie Poston:A later study by George and Mylickey extended this into metacognition, your ability to assess your own thinking. They found BS receptive people were also worse at predicting their own performance on problem solving tasks and worse at distinguishing solvable problems from unsolvable ones. If you think everything you encounter sounds meaningful, you lose the ability to calibrate what you actually know. This connects to the overclaiming research from last week as well. The same people who rate BS as profound also overestimate what they know when they're tested on specific topics.
Leslie Poston:The bullshit receptivity construct didn't stay in the New Age section for long. Researchers took it into politics, news media, and science, and the same pattern showed up everywhere. In 2020, Pennycook and Rand published a study connecting BS receptivity directly to fake news. Across three surveys with over 1,600 participants, people who rated generated nonsense as profound also rated fake news headlines as more accurate and were worse at distinguishing fake news from real reporting. People who scored higher on analytic thinking tests rejected fake news even when the headlines supported their own political side, which suggests the issue is less about rooting for your team and more about whether you stop and think about what you're reading at all.
Leslie Poston:They also found that removing the source label from articles on Facebook had no effect on anyone's accuracy judgments, meaning people weren't checking who published something either way. A team at the University of Amsterdam ran preregistered studies across The US, Serbia, and The Netherlands around the same time using vague political slogans and fake party platforms to measure political bullshit receptivity. It correlated with pseudo profound BS receptivity, free market ideology, and voting for right wing candidates and parties across all three countries. Psychiatrist Joe Pierre made a useful point about this research in Psychology Today. Political BS works differently than the new age variety of BS because it's not trying to sound deep.
Leslie Poston:It's trying to sound accessible while being deliberately vague, which makes it effective as a way to avoid engaging with complex policy question or conceding that a position has weaknesses. That same year, Evans and colleagues developed the Scientific Bullshit Receptivity Scale using nonsensical statements dressed up in scientific sounding language. Across three studies with nearly 2,000 participants, scientific BS receptivity correlated strongly with pseudoprofound BS receptivity. It also correlated with belief in science as an institution, which is counterintuitive but makes sense when you think about it. If you defer to the authority of science without actually engaging in analytic thinking that science represents, you're susceptible to anything that wears the right costume.
Leslie Poston:Scientific literacy helped moderate this somewhat, but the overall pattern held. Pierre also discussed a general bullshit receptivity scale from Slovak researchers that measured susceptibility across politics, health, relationships, and emotions, Using items like detox is the process of cleansing the mind of toxic thoughts. BS receptivity across all these domains correlated with conspiracy belief, paranormal beliefs, and pseudoscience. At this point, the research paints a picture of a general cognitive trait, something like a broad susceptibility rooted in relying on how things sound rather than evaluating what they actually mean. So what can we actually do about any of this?
Leslie Poston:Is there a way to train our own bullshit detectors? In 1969, an NYU professor named Neil Poston gave a talk to the National Convention for Teachers of English and argued that teaching kids to detect crap should take priority over every other educational aim. He also admitted he had no idea how to actually do it and doubted that schools could be reformed enough to pull it off. More than fifty years later, the research has gotten a lot more sophisticated, but implementation hasn't caught up. There's a principle called Brandolini's law, sometimes called the bullshit asymmetry principle.
Leslie Poston:It takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute BS than it takes to produce it. That means debunking after the fact, while necessary, will always be playing catch up. Once people have accepted something as meaningful, it's much harder to walk that back than it would have been to catch it in the first place. The most consistent finding across every study and every domain is that analytic thinking is the strongest predictor of BS detection. Analytic thinking is effortful by definition.
Leslie Poston:It means overriding your first impression and asking whether something actually means anything specific or whether it just sounds pretty or sounds smart. That's a skill you can practice and improve, but it takes deliberate effort, and we don't really teach it in any systematic way right now. Carl Bergstrom and Jevon West at the University of Washington created a course called Calling Bullshit that teaches data reasoning and critical evaluation of claims. And it's a great model for what this kind of education could look like, but it's one course at one university. Pierre argued that scaled down versions of this kind of training should start in elementary school, and I agree, but we're nowhere close to that being a reality right now.
Leslie Poston:In the meantime, there's a simple personal practice that comes out of this research. When something sounds impressive, try to restate it in plain language. If you can't say what it specifically means, that's your signal. Luttrell's advice from the recent Cornell study applies whether you're an employee, a consumer, or a voter. When messaging leans heavily on buzzwords and jargon, rhetoric is usually doing the work that substance should be doing.
Leslie Poston:Ask yourself what the actual claim is. If there isn't one, you're looking at BS regardless of how polished it sounds. Confident wrongness and bullshit receptivity are two expressions of the same problem, and the skill that counters both is the same, the willingness to pause and think before you accept or share something. If the corporate BS research is any indication, the people who most need to hear that are probably the ones who just forwarded you a memo about pressure testing adaptive coherence and thought it was inspiring. Side note, there's been some recent research that I didn't have time to look into this week about rebunking as a way to defeat this as well.
Leslie Poston:So look for that in a future episode. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to like, share, and subscribe if you find this useful.
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