Stat Of The Week: Academic Study Of Bulls**t Is Depressing, Predictable

The profundity of BS.

By Above the Law on December 04, 2015 3:31 pm

This week’s Stat is not specifically concerned with the legal profession, but as it deals with the nature of “bulls**t,” nobody can claim that it is not highly relevant.

Findings from a delightful new study published in the journal of Judgment and Decision Making suggest that– just as we all always knew–the dumber people are, the more they think that nonsense is “profound.” The authors of the study–a gaggle of Canadian academics—had their test subjects rate the “profundity” of some phrases “consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning.” The BS statements were rated on a scale of one to five. On average, the BS phrases were rated 2.6, halfway between “somewhat profound” and “fairly profound.” Further, the participants were presented with actual new age BS (i.e., Deepak Chopra’s tweets), intermixed with the randomly generated nonsense, and of course people couldn’t tell the difference.

The study participants were also given some intelligence tests that the authors used to develop a new metric, the Bulls**t Receptivity (BSR) scale. Among the study’s conclusions: “BSR was strongly negatively correlated with each cognitive measure except for numeracy (which was nonetheless significant). Furthermore, both ontological confusions and religious belief were positively correlated with bulls**t receptivity.”