Understanding and assessing bullshit vulnerability

Eugen-Calin Secara
2018 unpublished
Bullshit, besides being a pejorative colloquial term, is a research topic that attracted attention from several disciplinary domains including linguistics, philosophy and most recently psychology. A shift in the bullshit-centered approach, which revolved around the study of what can be reliably classified as bullshit, the reasons for producing it and the manner in which it harms society, has recently occurred, the new direction focusing not the source of bullshit but on the characteristics of
more » ... s receivers, the individual differences that predispose towards bullshit vulnerability. The first study investigated the effect of investing cognitive effort and of indirect cueing for the need to use analytic thinking on response bias and conflict detection, the presupposed mechanisms of bullshit vulnerability. One hundred thirty-two participants completed the measures, the results indicating that cognitive effort significantly decreased bullshit vulnerability by reducing response bias. An opposed effect was observed in the case of indirect cueing, bullshit vulnerability being augmented. Further analysis revealed that this was observed only in the case of participants that presented an intuitive cognitive style. The second study analysed the psychometric proprieties of a novel measure of vulnerability, targeting health-related bullshit. Seventy-one participants completed four assessments in a repeated measures design, the results indicating good internal consistency and promising evidence for establishing construct validity. Further research directions are discussed, focusing on the need to design a version of the scale that can assess vulnerability in a single session.
doi:10.25365/thesis.52450 fatcat:7de3poqymzc4he67p2rcrmx7om