Expanding the bullshit research out of pseudo-transcendental domain

Abstract

The ability to distinguish bullshit from factual, but less appealing, information is becoming a crucial skill in present-day society. The aim of this paper was to extend the research conducted by Pennycook et al. (Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549–563, 2015) by developing and validating the General Bullshit Receptivity Scale (GBRS), designed to measure bullshit in more general and non-transcendental context, than the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR). In this paper we assessed the psychometric properties of the GBRS on representative sample of Slovak participants (N = 458) and explored the relation between the GBRS and original BSR scale, epistemically suspect beliefs, ontological confusion, spirituality, personality and analytical thinking. People who thought the randomly generated transcendental statements were more profound were more susceptible to accepting more general bullshit and other epistemically suspect beliefs, and this tendency was accompanied with a low level of analytical thinking. Non-cognitive factors (agreeableness, spirituality) also contributed to perceptions the bullshit was profound and truthful. The most “impressive” bullshit was bullshit that did not contain obscure vocabulary but seemingly provided recipients with intuitive, though untruthful insights. We believe we have succeeded in constructing and refining a new measure for detecting other kind of bullshit that enables us to better understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms and personality variables.