It Turns Out You Can Bullshit A Bullshitter After All

You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. Well, that’s the saying — but is it true? Shane Littrell and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, Canada, set out to investigate. And in a new paper in the British Journal of Social Psychology they report that, in fact, people who bullshit more often in a bid to impress or persuade others are also more susceptible to bullshit themselves. The reason for this — also uncovered by the team — is truly fascinating. Some earlier work has suggested that better liars are also better at detecting lies. But as the team notes, bullshit isn’t quite the same, as it falls just short of outright deception. Recently, researchers have begun to treat bullshitting as having two separate dimensions. “Persuasive bullshitting” is motivated by a desire to impress or persuade. “Evasive bullshitting” is different — as a “strategic circumnavigation of the truth”, it’s the sort that a politician might engage in when trying to cover up a mistake, for example. By definition, the creation of either type of bullshit is intentional, though of course the spreading of bullshit may not be.  In an initial study, 219 adults recruited online completed the Bullshitting Frequency Scale. (This assesses, for example, how likely you think you are to persuasively bullshit a contribution to a discussion on a topic that you don’t know much about, or to evasively bullshit “when being fully honest would be harmful o...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Language Lying Social Source Type: blogs