Bullshit blind spots: the roles of miscalibration and information processing in bullshit detection

Abstract

The growing prevalence of misleading information (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between one’s ability to detect pseudo-profound bullshit, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the lowest (highest) bullshit detection performance overestimate (underestimate) their detection abilities and overplace (underplace) those abilities when compared to others. Additionally, people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. Taken together, these results show that both highly bullshit-receptive and highly bullshit-resistant people are largely unaware of the extent to which they can detect bullshit and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects.

Keywords:

• bullshit receptivity
• misinformation
• overconfidence
• dual process theory
• bias blind spot

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To eliminate redundant phrasings and sentence structures, we replaced 5 BSR items with new ones created using the same online generator (https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/) that Pennycook and colleagues (2015) used when constructing the original BSR items (see Supplementary Materials).

2 We report Welch’s F-test here because Levene’s test for equality of variances was violated, p < .001.

3 Recall that overplacement is a measure of bias rather than a difference score. Scores greater than 0 reflect the degree to which a person’s belief that their performance is better than the average person is unwarranted while scores below 0 represent the degree to which a person’s belief that their performance is worse than the average person is unwarranted.

4 “Blindsight” refers to the phenomenon in which people with certain forms of blindness respond to visual stimuli which they are unable to consciously see.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded with a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant Number: RGPIN-2016-04027).