In reply to Dalton (2016), the authors argue that bullshit is defined in terms of how it is produced, not how it is interpreted. They agree that it can be interpreted as profound by some readers (and assumed as much in the original paper). Nonetheless, they present additional evidence against the possibility that more reflective thinkers are more inclined to interpret bullshit statements as profound

Barr, Nathaniel

Cheyne, James Allen

Fugelsang, Jonathan A.

Koehler, Derek J.

Pennycook, Gordon

I raise a
methodological concern regarding the study performed by Pennycook, Cheyne,
Barr, Koehler and Fugelsang (2015), in which they used randomly generated, but
syntactically correct, statements that were rated for profundity by subjects
unaware of the source of the statements. The assessment of each statement’s
profundity was not based on its impact on the subject but was already
predetermined to be “bullshit” based on its random generation by a computer.
The statements could nonetheless have been subjectively profound and could have
provided glimpses of insight and wisdom to the subjects

Gordon
Pennycook

James Allan
Cheyne

Nathaniel
Barr

Derek J.
Koehler

Jonathan A.
Fugelsang

Directory of Open Access Journals

It’s still bullshit:
Reply to Dalton (2016)

SOURCE: Sheridan Scholarly Output Undergraduate Research Creative Excellence

Sheridan CollegeSOURCE: Sheridan Scholarly Output Undergraduate ResearchCreative ExcellenceFaculty Publications and Scholarship1-2016It’s Still Bullshit: Reply to Dalton (2016)Nathaniel BarrSheridan College, nathaniel.barr@sheridancollege.caGordon PennycookUniversity of WaterlooJames Allen CheyneUniversity of WaterlooDerek J. KoehlerUniversity of WaterlooJonathan A. FugelsangUniversity of WaterlooFollow this and additional works at: http://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_huma_publPart of the Social and Behavioral Sciences CommonsThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SOURCE: Sheridan Scholarly Output Undergraduate Research Creative Excellence. It hasbeen accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications and Scholarship by an authorized administrator of SOURCE: Sheridan Scholarly OutputUndergraduate Research Creative Excellence. For more information, please contact source@sheridancollege.ca.SOURCE CitationBarr, Nathaniel; Pennycook, Gordon; Cheyne, James Allen; Koehler, Derek J.; and Fugelsang, Jonathan A., "It’s Still Bullshit: Reply toDalton (2016)" (2016). Faculty Publications and Scholarship. Paper 2.http://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_huma_publ/2Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2016, pp. 123–125It’s still bullshit: Reply to Dalton (2016)Gordon Pennycook∗ James Allan Cheyne† Nathaniel Barr‡ Derek J. Koehler†Jonathan A. Fugelsang†AbstractIn reply to Dalton (2016), we argue that bullshit is defined in terms of how it is produced, not how it is interpreted. We agreethat it can be interpreted as profound by some readers (and assumed as much in the original paper). Nonetheless, we presentadditional evidence against the possibility that more reflective thinkers are more inclined to interpret bullshit statements asprofound.Keywords: bullshit, intention, meaning.1 ReplyBullshit has been defined as something that is constructedwithout concern for the truth (Frankfurt, 2005). By this def-inition, bullshit statements can be true, false, or meaning-less. The absence or presence of these factors is irrelevantto something being bullshit. Nonetheless, although bullshitstatements can be incidentally true, bullshit is generally falseand hence, often problematic.In our initial investigation of bullshit, we focused onstatements that consisted of randomly selected buzzwords(Pennycook et al., 2015). We used 20 different statementsacross 4 different studies (excluding items from DeepakChopra’s Twitter feed, which we will not discuss furtherin this reply). Examples include “wholeness quiets infi-nite phenomena” (wisdomofchopra.com) and “we are in themidst of a high-frequency blossoming of interconnectednessthat will give us access to the quantum soup itself” (seb-pearce.com/bullshit). We labelled these statements “pseudo-profound bullshit” because: 1) they were constructed absentany concern for the truth and, generally, for that reason, 2)they do not consistently have unambiguous meaning, thoughthey can sometimes interpreted by at least some people tohave profound meaning.In his commentary, Dalton notes, as do we, that at leastsome randomly generated statements can be taken as mean-ingful by some readers. Dalton takes this claim to havemethodological implications but we will argue below thisFunding for this study was provided by the Natural Sciences and En-gineering Research Council of Canada.Copyright: © 2016. The authors license this article under the terms ofthe Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.∗Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 Univer-sity Avenue West, Waterloo ON, Canada, N2L 3G1. Email: gpen-nyco@uwaterloo.ca.†Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo.‡The School of Humanities and Creativity, Sheridan College.cannot be true without further untenable assumptions. Wetake Dalton’s claim to actually be conceptual, if not philo-sophical. Specifically, Dalton’s conceptual point appears tobe based on a radical reader-response theoretical position inwhich the meaning of a text is solely what the reader makesof it. From such a perspective it is, of course, not possi-ble to say, a priori, that any text is ultimately and alwaysmeaningless as some reader will always have the last say.Dalton argues, it is (and will always be) possible for at leastsomeone, somewhere, to find (or perhaps more aptly “con-struct”) meaning, or what they take to be meaning, by suf-ficiently contemplating any statement. We, of course, agreeas the very premise of our study was that people would re-port sentences designed without regard to meaning to be atleast somewhat profound. Bullshit, following the definitionoffered by Frankfurt, however, depends on the intentions (orlack thereof) of the person uttering or writing the relevantstatements. Bullshit that is viewed as profound is still bull-shit.As a consequence, without endorsing a radical reader-response theory, we note that Dalton’s primary point is con-sistent with the goal of our study. Namely, we hypothesizedthat people would indeed report randomly generated state-ments as not only meaningful but profound and, moreover,that people would vary in this propensity. This expectationwas based on the assumption that people will find, or sup-pose that they have found, meaning in such statements. Thevery goal of the study was to investigate this tendency em-pirically, not to argue, as Dalton states, that: “if one cannotimmediately discern meaning in something it is automati-cally bullshit.” It is important to recognize that even if wetake a radical reader-response position, the only constrainton our original study was in the use of “pseudo-profound”as a label for the random sentences. Because they were con-structed without any concern for the truth, they are bullshit(by the Frankfurt definition we followed in our original pa-123Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2016 Bullshit receptivity — response to Dalton 124Table 1: The 5 most and least profound bullshit statements in Pennycook et al.’s (2015) Study 2.New scale Source Item Mean (SD)Moreprofoundbullshitsebpearce.com/bullshit As you self-actualize, you will enter into infinite empathy thattranscends understanding.2.87 (1.17)wisdomofchopra.com Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth. 2.87 (1.16)sebpearce.com/bullshit Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us. 2.82 (1.16)wisdomofchopra.com Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. 2.60 (1.03)sebpearce.com/bullshit The infinite is calling to us via superpositions of possibilities. 2.57 (1.22)Lessprofoundbullshitwisdomofchopra.com Your consciousness gives rise to a jumble of neural networks. 2.31 (1.20)sebpearce.com/bullshit Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy. 2.20 (1.12)sebpearce.com/bullshit Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the dreamscapevia bio-electricity.2.18 (1.15)wisdomofchopra.com The future explains irrational facts. 2.17 (1.11)wisdomofchopra.com Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity. 2.16 (1.05)per). Dalton appears to assume that our use of the term bull-shit implies some sort of value judgment, as it often is ineveryday use. In contrast, and following Frankfurt’s lead,we used bullshit as a technical term. This is the way that wehope it continues to be used in the academic literature.With regard to Dalton’s claim that his argument ismethodological, we note that this cannot be so unless oneassumes that a sample of random computer-generated state-ments have an equal probability of being interpreted asmeaningfully profound as human-generated statements in-tended to be meaningful (if not profound). Methodologi-cally, the key word in the forgoing sentence is sample. Inour study we found and reported that a sample of human-generated profound quotations (e.g., “A wet person does notfear the rain”) were rated as more profound than samplesof computer-generated random sentences (see Studies 3 and4). Thus, the equality of meaning assumption was demon-strably false for our study.In reference to the “Wholeness quiets infinite phenom-ena” example, Dalton takes a phenomenological stance tomeaning: “To engage with a passage like this we need tocontemplate it for more than a few seconds, perhaps a fewminutes (or hours, days, or months) and watch what hap-pens to our mind – this is the appropriate first person sub-jective experience and more appropriate outcome of inter-est.” In the research under discussion, however, such an ap-proach is not only inappropriate, but altogether irrelevant.Our interest, in this initial study, was not in the first-personphenomenology of readers’ subjective experience (though itmight constitute a possible and interesting subsequent lineof research) but simply in participants’ profundity ratings ofstatements designed to be lacking in that very quality (i.e.,as a way to index one’s receptivity to bullshit). Dalton’s ar-gument does imply the interesting and plausible hypothesisthat people who are more reflective, clever, and/or linguis-tically adept will be more apt to construct meaning in theambiguous statements. Unfortunately for this hypothesis,increasing reflectivity was negatively associated with report-ing greater profundity in bullshit statements. One possibilityis that more reflective people were indeed more able to findmeaning where none was intended but are also likely to re-alize that the meaning was constructed through their owncognitive efforts rather than by the ostensible author of thestatements.One potential response to this line of reasoning is that itmay be that only some of the randomly generated statementsare potentially meaningful to some readers or, perhaps moreprecisely, that the statements varied in the ease with whichthey could be assigned some meaning. Dalton notes, forexample that he cannot derive meaning from the followingstatement: “We are in the midst of a high-frequency blos-soming of interconnectedness that will give us access to thequantum soup itself”, though we suspect that some peoplemight. This possibility suggests the further hypothesis thatthe association between our variables of interest and profun-dity ratings for the bullshit items might vary as a function ofthe ease of constructing profound meaning from randomlygenerated sentences. To test this, we created two new scalesusing a subset of the items from Study 2. The “more pro-found” scale took the mean from the 5 items that were as-signed the highest average profundity rating and the “lessprofound” scale consists of the 5 lowest scoring items (seeTable 1). Both scales had acceptable internal consistency(Cronbach’s α = .81 and .75 for the relatively more andless profound items, respectively). As is evident from Table2, the two scales performed very similarly. Indeed, heuris-tics and biases performance was significantly more stronglycorrelated with the scale that consists of the more profoundJudgment and Decision Making, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2016 Bullshit receptivity — response to Dalton 125Table 2: Re-analysis of Pennycook et al.’s Study 2. Pear-son product-moment correlations for 5 most profound and5 least profound bullshit items. These data are for the fullsample (N = 187). ∗∗∗ p < .001, ∗∗ p < .01, ∗ p < .05.MoreprofoundbullshitLessprofoundbullshitHeuristics and Biases −.36∗∗∗ −.23∗∗Need for Cognition −.11 −.16∗Faith in Intuition .22∗∗ .25∗∗∗Numeracy −.24∗∗ −.18∗Verbal Intelligence −.26∗∗∗ −.25∗∗Advanced Progressive Matrices −.28∗∗∗ −.27∗∗∗Ontological Confusions .38∗∗∗ .47∗∗∗Religious Belief .24∗∗ .24∗∗Paranormal Belief .31∗∗∗ .27∗∗∗items (r = –.36) than it was with the less profound items (r= –.23). The correlations were significantly different fromone another according to a William’s test, t(187) = 2.08, p= .038, though both coefficients are significantly differentfrom zero (p’s < .01).This pattern of results is at variance with what we take tobe the implications of Dalton’s argument. Specifically, if theobservation that some participants may find transcendencein our bullshit items constrains our results, bullshit itemsthat are more likely to be subjectively meaningful for partic-ipants should be less strongly negatively correlated (or evenpositively correlated) with analytic thinking1. Our resultsindicate that, if anything, relatively more profound bullshitis more strongly negatively correlated with analytic think-ing; perhaps because it is more difficult to detect that theyare, in fact, bullshit.2 ConclusionThat it is possible for someone to find meaning in a state-ment does not prevent it from being bullshit. Indeed, bull-shit that is not found at least somewhat meaningful wouldbe rather impotent. Consider the evangelizing of politiciansand so-called spin-doctors, for example. Often, their goal isto say something without saying anything; to appear compe-tent and respectful without concerning themselves with the1To be clear, Dalton does not propose this analysis or any mechanismthat might explain why more profound bullshit would be differentially as-sociated with analytic thinking. Rather, our point is that this is a necessarycondition for Dalton’s observation that some bullshit items are more (or,perhaps, genuinely) profound to constrain the results of our original stud-ies. Put differently, our inclusion of items that are viewed as relatively moreprofound does not confound or constrain our findings in any way.truth. It is not the understanding of the recipient of bull-shit that makes something bullshit, it is the lack of concern(and perhaps even understanding) of the truth or meaningof statements by the one who utters it. Our original studyconcluded that people who are receptive to statements ran-domly generated without concern for meaning (i.e., bullshit)are less, not more, analytic and logical as well as more intel-ligent. Dalton’s commentary does not undermine this con-clusion.ReferencesDalton, C. (2016). Bullshit for you; transcendence for me.A commentary on “On the reception and detection ofpseudo-profound bullshit”. Judgment and Decision Mak-ing, 11, 121–122.Frankfurt, H. G. (2005) On Bullshit. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J. &Fugelsang, J. A. (2015). On the reception and detection ofpseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Mak-ing, 10, 549–563.

It’s Still Bullshit: Reply to Dalton (2016)

http://source.sheridancollege.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=fhass_huma_publ

It’s Still Bullshit: Reply to Dalton (2016)

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Directory of Open Access Journals

SOURCE: Sheridan Scholarly Output Undergraduate Research Creative Excellence