|
Originally Posted by Reddit
Lot of speculation here in these comments. For people who are interested, here is the actual paper, which was published in the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making.
The paper is about exploring what makes people more susceptible to believing in bull####. Contrary to the title, it says nothing about low intelligence. In fact, intelligence wasn’t even tested. What they actually tested were other correlates such as some kinds of prior beliefs and analytical thinking, to see what relationship they have with how inclined you are to believe bull####.
For anyone interested, this is what they did. They took 4 classes of statements:
1. Generated via computer, by randomly picking words from lists of buzzwords and jargon. These statements were syntactically correct, but meaningless, e.g. “Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.”
2. Picked from Deepak Chopra’s Twitter Feed. These were extremely vague statements that don’t actually say anything, e.g., “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.”
3. Common sayings and proverbs. These are metaphorical statements that contain some truth, e.g. “A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence.”
4. Regular factual statements, e.g., “Most people enjoy some kind of music.”
Participants were asked to rate these statements on a 1 to 5 scale of how profound they were. Basically, what you’re asking people here is to judge two things: first, is the statement true or not, and second, if it’s true, then is the truth just a trivial observation or is it profound? Based on their answers, each person was assigned a profundity score, which was used to put them on a bull#### receptivity scale (BSR), which measured how readily they classify computer-generated random nonsense as “profound”.
Then they measured a number of things about the participants to see which characteristics were related to high bull#### receptivity. Among them:
Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) a set of problems which have an obvious (intuitive) answer that is wrong. To find the correct answer, you have to put aside your intuition and actually think through the problem. As expected, people with low CRT scored are more receptive to bull####.
Wordsum Test, which measures people’s verbal comprehension. Again, people with low scores will more readily believe bull####.
Numeracy Test, with basic math problems. Low performance in this was also correlated with higher bull#### receptivity, though this correlation was much lower than all the others, which were very strong.
Ontological Confusions Scale (OCS). This is about those prior beliefs mentioned earlier. It’s about being able to differentiate between what’s real (e.g., “Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player”) and what’s metaphorical (e.g., “Friends are the salt of life”). Unsurprisingly, people who are less able to distinguish real from metaphorical are more receptive to bull####.
Religious beliefs asked people about their beliefs about specific topics including heaven, hell, afterlife, miracles, angels and demons, souls, etc. It was found that people who had higher religious beliefs were more susceptible to bull####.
Paranormal beliefs asked about whether people believed in things like mind reading, astrology, spiritualism, psi powers, witchcraft, omens, etc. People with higher paranormal beliefs were more susceptible to bull####.
Self-Reported Questionnaire where people were asked whether they have a more intuitive style of thinking versus a more analytical style. The self-reported intuitive types were more ready to believe bull####.
These are just some findings of how various things measured on the tests listed above correlate with bull#### receptivity. However, the bulk of the paper isn’t about this, it’s about asking why some people are more receptive to bull#### than others. Is it because they are generally uncritical (i.e., reflexively “open minded” in that they will accept almost anything uncritically), or is it because of a specific failure in being able to detect bull#### from reasonable statements.
|