On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit

[TheRealJoeFish]

Here's the first of four studies they did for the paper:


The buzzwords were actually pulled from Deepak Chopra's Twitter feed. (!)  Examples of sentences were "Imagination is inside exponential space time events" and "We are in the midst of a self-aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself".

That's odd, it takes me little effort at all to dismiss both of those as word salad.

pssst that means u r smart

On the basic 10-question randomly generated list, the average "profundity" was 2.6 on a 1 to 5 scale. The average profoundness of a participant's rating was negatively correlated with both verbal and quantitative competence and positively negatively correlated with their religiosity (as measured by belief in things like heaven, hell, soul and satan).