In his famous work On Bullshit, the philosopher Henry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech intended to persuade or manipulate someone without regard for truth. He distinguished it from lying, which refers to speech intended to persuade someone of a falsehood. So while the liar attempts to steer his interlocuter away from truth, the bullshitter is largely unconcerned with truth—seeking instead to impress or bamboozle his interlocuter.
There’s a certain amount of bullshit floating around on all sides of the political spectrum—no ideology being completely immune. But we can still ask: which ideology is most receptive to bullshit?
Psychologists and political scientists have been looking into this question for the last decade. Initial studies were inconclusive, with some finding that right-wing individuals are more susceptible to bullshit and others finding that individuals on the extremes of politics (both right and left) are more susceptible.
In a 2019 study, Artur Nilsson and colleagues sought to reconcile these conflicting results. They studied susceptibility to bullshit in Sweden, a country with a multi-party system, and they examined the separate effects of social liberalism and economic leftism.
The authors used a clever method to measure receptivity, which was originally developed by Gordon Pennycook and colleagues. Specifically, they asked participants to rate the profundity of seven bullshit statements (e.g., “Your movement transforms universal observations”) as well as seven genuine aphorisms (e.g., “Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in”). The bullshit statements were generated by stringing together random profound-sounding words into syntactically correct sentences.
Bullshit receptivity was measured by participants’ ratings of the seven bullshit statements. Another construct, bullshit sensitivity, was measured by adjusting participants’ ratings of the seven bullshit statements for their ratings of the seven genuine aphorisms. The rationale here is that some people might have a tendency to rate any statement as profound—and adjusting for ratings of the aphorisms controls for this.
As to political ideology, Nilsson and colleagues asked participants which party they would vote for, where they would place themselves on a 9-point economic left/right scale from “economic equality is much more important” to “economic freedom is much more important”, and where they would place themselves on a 7-point liberal/conservative scale from “much more in the liberal direction” to “much more in the conservative direction”.
So what did the authors find? Bullshit receptivity was positively associated with social conservatism but negatively associated with economic rightism (albeit weakly). It was also positively associated with religiosity. When the authors broke down the results by party, they were particularly interesting:
Supporters of the centrist Liberal party and the centre-right Center party were the least receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit and the most sensitive to it. At the other end of the spectrum were supporters of the left-wing Green Party, who were the most receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. Consistent with the earlier results, supporters of the right-wing Sweden Democrats were also receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. Other parties’ supporters fell somewhere in between.
Interestingly, supporters of the Green Party had average reasoning ability (unlike supporters of the Sweden Democrats), indicating that their receptivity to bullshit cannot be attributed to a general lack of critical thinking. The authors suggest it may stem from “prior exposure to pseudo-profound bullshit”, perhaps in the form of New Age spirituality.
Overall, the study suggests that the relationship between ideology and susceptibility to bullshit is complicated, with social conservatives being more receptive than social liberals and economic leftists being slightly more receptive than economic rightists. However, it is the Green movement that appears to be most receptive—at least in Sweden.
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Ample scope to extend Professor Nilsson’s seminal study to any number of other variables – age, sex, educational attainment, working sector, etc.
BS detector correlated with age in this OAP’s experience – decades exposure to corporate ecosystems, managerial leadership, best practice, deep dives, culture jams, vibrancy through consolidation, etc, etc, etc, sensitises nostrils no end to faintest whiff of bovine ordure.
See also: Bullshit Jobs
RIP David Graeber
I recall Patrick Valance telling the Hallet debacle that Johnson was bamboozled.
This is the same guy who was hauled up short for showing out-of-date data to promote the second UK lockdown.
We know who was bamboozled – and who was doing the bamboozling. Sack him.
The future Lord Sir Sir bamboozled in a previous existence…
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sirtris-compounds-worthless-really
…Scroll down the comments section for insider verdicts, on how Lord Sir Sir sluiced away 720 million bucks of GSK’s money, alongside the sidekick who later headed Operation Warp Speed.
Socially liberal
Fiscally conservative
I always knew it was the best way to be 🙂
The bull5hit detector is directly connected to, and filtered by, the trusted authority recognition system (TARS) and that, set in place by schooling achievement, is hard-wired to the ego. So if one is highly and successfully schooled, one is going to believe in oneself as being an expert. This makes you far more likely to respect the edict of other highly schooled experts in all other fields. If you do not you degrade your own self worth to yourself and others. Schooling is all about telling the most highly and successfully schooled that they are the best of the best, that what they have learnt is truth.
The people who daydreamed at school, couldn’t wait to get on with whatever is their interest, didn’t learn to be so confident of such received wisdom. But what they retained intact instead was their innate ability to think for themselves.
I think if you soon discovered that the MSM messages re Covid/mmRNA vaccines/WHO/BBC etc. early on were bullshit, congratulations. It wasn’t nudging or bullshit, they all LIED. I have to admit that as I have some expertise in that area it was easy for me so massive Kudos to those without.
From there it’s an easy path to see the other lies-
Global warming.
The necessity for CBDC.
Putin bad – the West good.
Diversity is our strength.
I would put the sterling efforts of the IDF in murdering women and kids in that list, but too many on here have been properganderised/Spielberged.
Downtickers, read some history – at least from 1948.
Sounds like bullshit to me! 🙂
Anyone get a sense that this research is “Bullsh*t”? There may be a case of looking from the wrong end of the telescope.
Deciding what is true before you know the facts and then rigidly refusing to change your mind once you do know them is typical of the Liberal Progressive. Climate Change opinion is a great example, where confirmation bias is rife. The climate change zealot decides what is true and then looks around for everything that seems to confirm that pre-conceived idea while ignoring everything that doesn’t.
Not sure what this study tells me.
It would have been far more interesting to pitch this against EQ and IQ or information gathering from MSM vs other sources.