'Bullshit is everywhere, so I think we need to know more about it,' he says. Up until now, this hasn't been a major focus of psychological research.

Surprisingly, the average participant rated the gibberish as being between 'somewhat profound' and 'fairly profound.' (Responses to these fake tweets were nearly indistinguishable from the responses to Chopra's real tweets).ĭigging deeper, Pennycook found that acceptance of bullshit statements appears to be related to personal traits such as lower intelligence, belief in the paranormal, and the likelihood of believing in conspiracies. So as part of his study, he had people rate these randomly generated tweets. 'I wondered if people actually thought these were profound,' Pennycook tells me. There's something uncanny and compelling about these randomly generated nothing statements. Pennycook's inquiry into bullshit started with a visit to, which lampoons Deepak Chopra, the writer and spiritualist known for obtuse sayings like 'attention & intention are the mechanics of manifestation.' The site randomizes Chopraisms to create nonsense sentences: I know my awareness is fearful of the species specific energy of a rattlesnake. Such as: What makes a person a good bullshit detector? Why are some people more susceptible to bullshit than others? Pennycook is the lead author of a new study wonderfully titled 'On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit.' In it, he and his colleagues asked questions no psychologists have touched on before. 'Tell me about your bullshit study,' I asked Gord Pennycook, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Let me tell why thats bullshit