 And now our next speaker is somebody who has been paying careful attention to what people around him are saying Which if I read the news properly is becoming a rarer and rarer thing these days the peace prize as you know was awarded for the the authors of the Study called on the reception and detection of pseudo profound bullshit. Please welcome Nathaniel Barr All right afternoon everybody. I got a lot of bullshit to cover in five minutes First place to start what is bullshit what isn't it we drew from Harry Frankfurt's Classic manuscript on bullshit to get an academic technical definition to work with so he described bullshit as Something constructive without any concern for the truth and this is different than lying right because if you want to lie You have to know what the truth is and go against it You have to subvert the truth whereas bullshit is just talking without any concern whatsoever for the truth You know trying to impress rather than inform So, you know probably don't need any convincing of this, but bullshit's everywhere You know we can look at the fact-checking of Presidential nominees and debates and whatnot, you know some of that's lying, but a lot of it's bullshitting Health care is a prominent area of bullshit as well. You might know dr. Oz He claimed this green coffee would make you lose weight turns out that's bullshit There was actually an interesting study in the British Medical Journal that found that actually less than half of what they were Claiming to be true on his show was actually supported by any evidence When he was put before Congress he actually said he sees himself as a cheerleader, right? So he's trying to sort of impress upon people things without any concern for the truth, right now I think it's probably clear that you know, I told you what bullshit is It's ubiquitous, but no one had really tapped into this from a psychological perspective and asked who's gonna believe bullshit The real starting point for us was some of you might recognize this guy. It's Deepak Chopra He he actually won an ignoble back in the 90s for his creative interpretation of the term quantum You know, he has books like Ageless Body Timeless Mind Quantum Healing Soul of leadership and he gets called out a lot for not really caring about the truth, right? So for example, he says a lot of stuff like this attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation Now some people have kind of taken to this and there's this interesting website that actually Generates things like this the future is the path to a symbolic representation Marvel and how they do this This site's called wisdom of Chopra, which pulls Pulls buzzwords from his Twitter feed and rearranges them into syntactically valid sentences When you actually think about the definition of bullshit from the philosophical tradition We realized that something constructed absinity concern for the truth This is an algorithm that generates this this sort of fits what we thought was the true definition of bullshit And we called it we fancied this to be a particular kind. There's probably many types of bullshit We called this the pseudo profound So what we did is we pulled and there's another website similar called The New Age bullshit generator So we pulled from wisdom of Chopra and the New Age bullshit generator and we gave people statements like this and this constructed by an algorithm Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty quite simply what we did is we asked people how profound do you think that is what? Not at all profound and five very profound and so we pulled these from this website We got a scale developed. We called it the bullshit receptivity scale very Sound scale psychometrically speaking one thing that's kind of fun is people find so on the scale the bullshit is Rated somewhere between somewhat and fairly profound so people like it So our study is pretty straightforward. We're interested Do people rate bullshit as profound if we get a scale seems they do is it reliable? Yeah, the scale was great and then we turn to the next question Does this correlate with conceptually relevant variables? So We looked at analytic thinking intelligence and skepticism about supernatural and religious belief And so we basically gave people this we correlated some things So you probably know where I'm going with this people who were less Analytic and more intuitive rated the bullshit as more profound those who were less intelligent found it more profound and those who were more Skeptical were more resistant to the bullshit So we did some discrimination or psychologists. We got serious about this Is it the case that it's just because they find everything profounders that's specific to bullshit So we decided to give people some other things. So we have our pseudo profound bullshit items We also gave people motivational quotations as well as some mundane statements And we do find there's a general thing where people who find anything profound find the bullshit profound But there is some interesting findings where we look at the relation between analytic thinking style Negative correlation with the bullshit No relation with the motivational quotes and the mundane stuff. So another way to look at this Oh, and by the way, people do find the bullshit almost as profound as the real motivational quotes But when we look at this we can split this in half by the intuitive subjects and the more reflective subjects and for The reflective or analytic people they find on the right there the profound quotes to be more profound than the bullshit Whereas for intuitive people, they're not discriminating at all So we think that analytic thinking allows us to be sensitive to pseudo profound bullshit just for some examples Only those who are risk. Oh, yeah, we got interrupted. Okay, so There's some Last thing I'm doing it with this Deepak Chopra We used his real tweets and the correlation between Profundity ratings for his tweets and our bullshit scale was point eight eight So Anyways We can study bullshit as psychologists, and we should probably start taking it seriously. So check out the paper. Thanks Are there any questions Raise your arm Hi as I seem to remember from my high school class and maybe this was the scholar that you excited There are actually three levels of shit chicken shit bullshit and elephant shit. Oh planning to expand your research into these other levels I Think it's probably important, you know like I said we focused on the pseudo profound because it seemed such a perfect opportunity Given that these websites exist and as I said it really fits well in that academic definition But we we're hoping you know, of course This is research that makes you laugh and that make you think but we're hoping that other researchers start to think about all Those levels of shit that permeate our lives and could try to find ways to Scientifically dive in deeply but yeah That was a perfectly pseudo profound question was it not Next question, can you relate this also to like conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists? And if so, can you please talk to my mom? Actually, we did include a measure of conspiratorial thinking It does indeed correlate with finding the bullshit profound However, it was it was part of our receptivity So they found everything profound the people that were conspiratorily minded the truth The true things that really were specific to the pseudo profound bullshit were the analytic thinking and the skepticism But yeah, we do find a correlation between their profundity ratings and the extent to which they buy into conspiracy It's good question. It's in the paper. Check it out So it seems like you used a lot of kind of tweet length Statements, and I wonder if have you studied whether there's any correlation between the length of the statement and people's ability to distinguish between actually profound statements and pseudo profound. Yeah, that's a great question. We haven't but you know, there is Sort of like literary work that sort of assesses the use of vague Statements and things like that in the body of a longer work So it's it's sort of an effective literary device to get the reader thinking about things But yeah, there's no empirical work yet. You know, we're really just Beginning the study of bullshit, I'd say but yeah, it's a great question Okay, one more question now. Are you familiar with Stephen the great philosopher Stephen Colbert? The truthiness truthiness isn't this a kind of isn't truthiness sort of a non-schatological version of what you're talking about Yeah, yeah, there's lots of connections to other existing things for sure another one is Carl Sagan talked about baloney detection as well You know, yeah, if you know Colbert tell him to give us a call. We'd love to talk about bullshit But yeah, great question. Yeah, there's that's the nice thing about this work is we think that it ties into a lot of the existing work on persuasion lying You know, it's really it's been as of yet an untapped Resource in psychological science. So hopefully, you know, if any researchers are here Give us a call if you want to do some research on bullshit. So, yeah, thanks Okay, thank you If you have further questions stick around One question, I'm sure everybody wants to know the answer. What are you doing Monday night? Monday night. I don't know. I'm open to invitations. What's the first presidential debate? And I had assumed that you were flooded with invitations from news organizations To sit in and commentate on yeah, no invites Yeah, but you know, we're a team of Canadian scientists. So we're trying to avoid all this bullshit down here I should add One one great Thing that happened after is this this paper has been cited quite a few times in the year since we published it But there's a great paper that was published called Misperceiving bullshit as profound is associated with favorable views of Cruz Rubio Trump and conservatism So this is a peer-reviewed article that was published after ours So, you know, if you want to know how politics and bullshit relate it's already been done, too So if anyone here is friendly with somebody who produces a radio or television news program This is the perfect guest to have on Monday night. Please please let them know. Thank you very much