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Turns Out You Can Bullshit a Bullshitter
Purveyors of BS are likely to eat it up, too, new research finds
The common wisdom that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter is a bunch of BS. Rather, people who habitually exaggerate stories and distort facts with the intent to persuade or impress others are more likely than straight shooters to be fooled by misinformation themselves, a new study of people in the US and Canada finds.
“It probably seems intuitive to believe that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, but our research suggests that this isn’t actually the case,” says Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychology PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo in Canada and lead author of the research paper, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology. “In fact, it appears that the biggest purveyors of persuasive bullshit are ironically some of the ones most likely to fall for it.”
Psychiatrists have long understood that bullshit isn’t always pure baloney, and that purveyors of BS can seed the spread of misinformation like a bad virus.
“It’s constructed in order to appear meaningful, though on closer examination, it isn’t,” explains Joe Pierre, MD, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Scientists in fact distinguish between bullshit and outright lies, which we’re all capable of telling.
“Bullshit isn’t the same as lying,” Pierre writes. “A liar knows the truth but makes statements deliberately intended to sell people on falsehoods. Bullshitters, in contrast, aren’t concerned about what’s true or not, so much as they’re trying to appear as if they know what they’re talking about.”
Two types of bullshitters
For the new study, Littrell and his colleagues defined BS as “information designed to impress, persuade, or otherwise mislead people that is often constructed without concern for the truth.” They surveyed 826 people to determine their levels of self-confidence and degrees of thinking ability on various measures. Each participant also ranked the accuracy, truthfulness and profoundness of statements that were in fact pseudo-scientific, pseudo-profound or just plain fake-news.
