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Heuristics
What Kinds of People Think BS Is Profound?
New studies explore who is especially likely to believe baloney.
Posted March 23, 2016
A lot of people want to impress us with what they know and with their ability to provide deep and meaningful insights into life. Presumably, one reason you read articles at a site like this is to learn something important about yourself and the people around you.
Any time there is a resource of value, though, there are people who will try to counterfeit that resource, in order to get the benefit of having it without the trouble of actually acquiring it. There are counterfeit diamonds, counterfeit currency—and counterfeit profundity. We call it “baloney," nonsense, or just BS. It would be valuable for people to be able to distinguish between really profound statements and those that are BS. But what helps us make this distinction? And are there people who are especially susceptible to BS?
Gordon Pennycook, James Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang explored this question in a cool paper in the November 2015 issue of the journal Judgment and Decision Making. These authors point out that there are lots of different kinds of baloney. They are particularly interested in what they call “pseudo-profound” nonsense. This type consists of sentences that use lots of ambiguous words in a way that seems to say something deep about the human condition, but on further reflection does not seem to carry any substantive meaning at all. For example, the statement "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" has lots of big words and seems to hint at a great truth. But it is not at all obvious what the statement means.
In order to detect that such a statement is BS, people have to get beyond the veneer of depth and recognize that the particular collection of words has no clear meaning. Then they have to admit that they do not understand the meaning of the statement and assume that their inability to understand reflects something about the person who made it—and is not because they themselves are incapable of understanding its meaning.
In several studies, researchers asked participants to rate the depth of different statements. Some were a collection of pseudo-profound BS sentences. In a few studies, there were also two kinds of control sentences—some that were straightforward true statements, and some that were moderately profound sentences like you might see on a motivational poster—"Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself," for example.
Across studies, participants also filled out a variety of other tests. Some measured analytic reasoning ability versus people’s tendency to reason based on heuristics (or rules of thumb). Other tests explored whether people can distinguish between statements that are literally true or metaphorical. Still others examined people’s tendency to believe in paranormal phenomena.
Overall, participants found the pseudo-profound baloney statements to be deeper when they tended to rely on heuristics rather than on analytic reasoning. People also found these statements to be deeper if they tended to have trouble separating metaphor from literal statements and/or if they believed in the paranormal.
In a few studies that included both pseudo-profound nonsense and moderately profound statements, the authors used a measure of BS detection. When people rated the moderately profound statements as "deeper" than the BS statements, that suggested they were able to distinguish between these types of sentences.
The size of this difference (that is, the ability to detect BS) was higher for people who relied on analytic reasoning than for those who relied on heuristic reasoning. It also tended to be higher the less people entertained paranormal beliefs.
These studies suggest that both elements of baloney influence whether someone will accept pseudo-profound statements as deeply profound:
- People need to be able to recognize that a statement is confusing. The ability to separate metaphoric statements from literal ones is important here, though analytic reasoning ability probably also plays a role.
- People need to recognize that when a statement makes no sense, that suggests it may be BS rather than being a deep statement that the hearer just doesn’t understand. The ability to reason analytically, and the tendency to be skeptical of claims in general (such as paranormal claims) is important for this aspect of BS.
The ability to avoid falling prey to counterfeit wisdom is particularly important in the Internet age. Lots of websites out there peddle all kinds of information. It is hard to figure out that a statement is not really that wise just from what it looks like. Instead, it is important to seek to understand the information before deciding that it is profound.
In the end, it is important to remember that the clearest thinkers express their ideas in ways that others can understand widely. And anyone with a truly deep idea should seek ways to communicate it as effectively as possible.
There is no need to obscure the meaning of truly profound statements.
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