“On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit” Analysis of the Article

Thesis Statement:

“How people react to the bullshit when presented to them in the form of the questionnaire.”

The bullshit seems to be very common nowadays, even it has been given much attention by the philosopher also, and the reception about which we had the knowledge, it has also been gone through the empirical investigation. The main topic here is pseudo-profound bullshit, it mostly consists of impressive statement that seems to be true and provide meanings but at the same time it is also vacuous. In this participants are provided with the statement with consists of bullshit in form of buzzwords which are typically organized in the form of statements and they make the syntactic structure but it does not consist of any discernible meaning. Multiple studies have been done to judge the statements that contain bullshit and that they were associated with variety of variables that were conceptual and relevant. The parallel association was somehow less evident as compared to the profundity judgments as they were more conventionally profound or even mundane statements. The results of such studies show that certain persons are receptive other and new kinds of bullshit and the noticing process is the substance of unselective skepticism but it is relatively the judgment of the vague deception in the other type of sounding claims. The results of such a study show that marking true to such a statement can be a significant constituent of the “pseudo-profound bullshit”.

As, in the very start of the article it has been reported that no one can lie until and unless he knows the truth and making the bullshit needs no such conviction, this famous line was said by Harry Frankfurt. According to the philosopher named as Harry Frankfurt the bullshit has been developed to impress but it is constructed in such a way that the concern of truth is absent. This makes it easy to distinguish the lie from the bullshit. When we try to find out the different meaning of bullshit we consult the different dictionary and one of the famous dictionaries namely Oxford defines bullshit as “nonsense” or “rubbish”. The bullshit described in the pseudo-profound is not trivial. Frankfurt noted the real lack of concern for the truth in 2005 but the bullshit in the pseudo-profound also lacks the concern for the truthiness and also the verisimilitude.

In general there can be two candidate mechanisms that can help us in explaining the receptivity of bullshit. The first can be that there are certain people around us who have strong biases for accepting the things as an exact or expressive from that of the outset. Another device transmits to the incapability to sense the bullshit which can help the individual to confuse the vagueness of the profundity. According to the report there are four studies which are used to ask the participants about the pseudo-profound bullshit and other statements which are present on the profundity scale. The main purpose of this is to establish this as the measure the bullshit receptivity.  There are certain theories discussed in the article one of them is the theories of decision and reasoning of dual process that help to distinguish between intuitive processes that are cued autonomously and the reflective processes that are basically effortful and also deliberative and that requires the memory to be working (Evans and Stanovich). This article describes that the pseudo-profound bullshit compromise both adults and children and they are confused about the aspects of reality and in a systematic way (Lindeman, Svedholm-Hakkinen and Lipsanen). Epistemically suspect is the name that has been given to the naturalistic conception about the world.

PROBLEMATIC:

In study one we showed the participants with statements which were ten in number and have a syntactical structure and consists of random buzzwords. The participants were asked to mark each statement between the 1 to 5 scales. It consist of α = .82. In study two we use the examples from the real world bullshits. For this purpose another scale was formed. There were 10 meaningless statements which were used in study one. There was one cognitive task which was completed by the participants and there was one questionnaire of self-reported which indicated the individual differences in the style of analytic cognitive.  To know about the ability of cognition we retained to the Words with α= .63.  The statistical reliable measure was established in study 1 and study 2 of the bullshit receptivity that was in the end correlated with many related variables conceptually. In study number 3 it was constructed to know that many people may be insensitive to the bullshit of pseudo-profound maybe because they cannot detect the conflicts of reasoning. The difference in the rating done between the meaningful quotation and the pseudo-profound bullshit as they serve the sensitivity of bullshit in our measure, in the results we came to know that out of 114 participants there were 47 participants who were aware of Deepak Chopra’s tweet. When talking about the full sample, BSR items’ rating has been done with α = .91 and for the Deepak Chopra’s tweet α = .93 is used respectively. From the results of study three we came to know that there is a connotation among intensity rating and the deep philosophy and that is exact to the items which contain bullshit.

RESPONSES:

So, in study four the members were requested to rate the intensity of almost 20 substances. In this scale the items from the BSR scale was only made 10 in use. In the following study the initial investigation includes the individual differences to that of the pseudo-profound bullshit. In this article there have been discussed two mechanisms which somehow describes why people are willing to rate the bullshit. In the first mechanism we came to know that some people are prone to rate the bullshit while in the second mechanism we came across the people who have no issue while rating the bullshit. Some of the sensitivity of bullshit is associated with the belief of paranormal beliefs. The main purpose of this study was to know about the individual differences regarding the bullshit.

There are many forms of the bullshit and in this article and studies only one type was under-discussed. Bullshit is taken as the consequential aspect of the condition of humanity. As compared to a few years back individual come across more bullshit nowadays on the everyday bases. To rate the buzzwords were the common idea which was taken from the Deepak Chopra’s tweets. Every people react to bullshit in different way to the other.