Which Ideology is Most Receptive to Bullshit?

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.