New research has found that people who are receptive to "pseudo-profound bullshit" (PPBS) quotes also tend to be the sort of people who perceive patterns in the world where others don't.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne and York University in Toronto published two studies in a paper in the European Journal of Personality. The studies found that apophenia (a perception error that makes people interpret random phenomena as patterns) was positively correlated with finding meaning in PPBS (this was dubbed "bullshit receptivity" in the research).
The research included a total of 297 participants. The first study involved reading and rating the profundity of incoherent PPBS statements such as "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty" as well as quotes that objectively hold meaning such as "The creative adult is the child who survived".
Participants who scored high for measures of apophenia rated the incoherent PPBS statements as more profound.
Participants who rated higher for intelligence were generally more able to detect the difference between the meaningless quotes and quotes that were actually profound, rating the latter as higher in profundity.
Tim Bainbridge, a PhD candidate from the University of Melbourne and the lead author of the paper, told BuzzFeed News that this inability to discriminate between the bullshit and the meaningful quotes can be perceived as a side effect of too much openness in a personality.
“It does seem to be that there is a cost to being sort of too open to accepting new things — and that can become delusional,” said Bainbridge.
Bainbridge said that the research indicates there might be differences in our ability to discriminate between sense and nonsense.
The body of research for believing PPBS has been growing for several years. A definitive study on the topic was published in 2015 by assistant professor Gordon Pennycook from the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Pennycook and a team of Canadian psychology researchers conducted four studies trying to link the likelihood of a person believing PPBS with other cognitive or personality traits.
In these studies, participants who rated quotes that had no discernible meaning (such as “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”) as profound statements were more likely to show an intuitive thinking style and a belief in the supernatural.
The researchers stress that the statements must have correct syntactic structure and can't just be a random collection of words — the quotes need to imply that they hold meaning or truth without actually containing either.
A study from Swedish researchers published in July of this year found that amongst over a thousand participants, people who were more receptive to the PPBS statements were less likely to report prosocial behaviours such as charity donations or volunteering.
People who were able to distinguish between the PPBS statements ("Health and tolerance provide creativity for the future") and actually profound quotes ("A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence") were more likely to engage in those prosocial behaviours.
The researchers theorised that an ability to detect bullshit more readily could be a trait that goes hand in hand with being more critical of the world, making people adhere more to moral and civic obligations.
Another study published in November in Slovakia and Romania found that rating nonsense statements as profound was closely associated with belief in alternative medicine, conspiracies, and religious confusion.
While this sort of research is still very much in its infancy, Bainbridge believes that the PPBS studies could eventually be applied to assessing people for risk of indiscriminately believing things like fake news and trying to slow those cognitive processes to become more discerning.
"I think there's potentially the idea of something practical coming out of this, so if we can identify people who are more likely to be fooled, we can maybe try and put in place some strategies to try and help," Bainbridge said.
CORRECTION
Gordon Pennycook's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post.