Pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity is the tendency to perceive meaning in important-sounding, nonsense statements. To understand how bullshit receptivity differs across domains, we develop a scale to measure scientific bullshit receptivity — the tendency to perceive truthfulness in nonsensical scientific statements. Across three studies (total N = 1,948), scientific bullshit receptivity was positively correlated with pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity. Both types of bullshit receptivity were positively correlated with belief in science, conservative political beliefs, and faith in intuition. However, compared to pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity, scientific bullshit receptivity was more strongly correlated with belief in science, and less strongly correlated with conservative political beliefs and faith in intuition. Finally, scientific literacy moderated the relationship the two types of bullshit receptivity; the correlation between the two types of receptivity was weaker for individuals scoring high in scientific literacy.

Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. We find support for this prediction across three experiments (N = 627) and four distinct measures of pattern perception. We further demonstrate that this observed relation is restricted to illusory pattern perception, with participants displaying greater endorsement of non-illusory patterns being no more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. Additionally, this relation is not a product of a general proclivity to rate all statements as profound and is not accounted for by individual differences in analytic thinking. Overall, we demonstrate that individuals with a tendency to go beyond the available data such that they uncritically endorse patterns where no patterns exist are also more likely to create and endorse false-meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. These findings are discussed in the context of a proposed framework that views individuals’ receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit as, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive process: that of pattern perception.

We conducted additional analyses of Pennycook et al.’s (2015, Study 2) data to investigate the possibility that there would be ideological differences in “bullshit receptivity” that would be explained by individual differences in cognitive style and ability. As hypothesized, we observed that endorsement of neoliberal, free market ideology was significantly but modestly associated with bullshit receptivity. In addition, we observed a quadratic association, which indicated that ideological moderates were more susceptible to bullshit than ideological extremists. These relationships were explained, in part, by heuristic processing tendencies, faith in intuition, and lower verbal ability. Results are inconsistent with approaches suggesting that (a) there are no meaningful ideological differences in cognitive style or reasoning ability, (b) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with leftist (vs. rightist) economic preferences, or (c) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with extremist (vs. moderate) preferences. Theoretical and practical implications are briefly addressed.