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Research shows that people who BS are more likely to fall for BS | Waterloo News (uwaterloo.ca)

submitted 8 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science@mander.xyz

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 21 points 8 months ago (3 children)

So "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" is bullshit. Does it mean that people who bullshit "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" are easier to bullshit? (This gets recursive.)

Okay, I'm being cheeky. Serious now: I found a pre-print of the paper. Also make sure to read the supporting material, even if just for fun - some of the bullshit quotes used in the study are hilarious.

[from the paper] recent research has suggested that bullshitting and lying, while clearly related, are psychologically distinguishable constructs (Littrell et al., 2020). For example, liars show a stronger negative association with self-regard and a stronger positive association with lie acceptability than bullshitters (Littrell et al., 2020).

I wonder how well the distinction would hold cross-linguistically. "Strong" Sapir-Whorf might be bullshit, but the weak version is worth checking.

My hypothesis is that the sort of people who'd engage on persuasive bullshit cares less about truth value of the statements, and that's what giving them a hard time asserting the truth value of what others say. In the meantime, evasive bullshitters are already using an evasive approach because they don't want to say an untrue statement.

[–] Endward23 2 points 8 months ago

“Strong” Sapir-Whorf might be bullshit, but the weak version is worth checking.

Really persuasiv sounding. ;-)

My hypothesis is that the sort of people who’d engage on persuasive bullshit cares less about truth value of the statements, and that’s what giving them a hard time asserting the truth value of what others say.

Hontestly speaking. This viewpoint isn't completely false. In some contextes, other aspects are more important than just straight up true value. For instances, some people seems to be used to judge a view not on the merit of it's reasons, but because of the socially consequences which would arise if the view would hold by a lage mayority. Even if we agree that such points should be irrelevant for a rational discussion, we already know that not all discussions are rational.

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