Understanding Pseudo-Profound Statements

After examining a rather small body of research on bullshit, we focus on the bullshit receptivity of Slovenian and Finnish teachers and students. Finnish higher education system and management schools were ranked substantially higher by the Global Economic Forum in 2015. Out of 144 countries, Slovenian higher education system is ranked 48th (scoring 4.1 on a scale from 1–7), Finnish second (5.9), with Finnish management schools taking tenth place (5.6) and Slovenian 74th. Being teachers ourselves, we thought it would be interesting to see if there are any substantial differences in recognizing bullshit statements between Slovenian and Finnish educators and students. We asked respondents to assess the level of profoundness in a set of 15 statements, of which only three were meaningful. Prior to this, the respondents were requested to complete the 18-item Need for Cognition (NFC) scale and the 16-item Faith in Intuition (FI) scale to see if those with higher nfc/fi scores are better or worse at recognizing bullshit. With an average score of 1.54 on the NFC scale, our respondents were not very likely to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities. On the other hand, with the score as low as 1.27 on the FI scale, our respondents were also unlikely to trust their feelings and intuition. As for the pseudo-profound statements, they were rather keen on giving high scores (average 2.94) to sentences lacking any meaning. Our research proved that there is a negative correlation between the Need for Cognition and pseudo-profound statements for the whole sample. On the other hand, this is not statistically significant for the subsample of Finnish teachers and students, for the subsample of both Finnish and Slovenian students, where it is neither present nor statistically significant, and for the subsample of teachers (Slovenian and Finnish) where the correlation is negative, but not statistically significant. As for the Faith in Intuition and pseudo-profound statements, a positive correlation does not exist, except for the subsample of Slovenian and Finnish teachers. Finally, our research proved that the correlation between Need for Cognition and Faith in Intuition is strong, positive and statistically significant. Faced with the esoteric bullshit statements, participants might not want to endure the struggle to grasp the meaning of the statements and simply rated vacuous statements as profound either due to the lack of motivation to engage in cognitive activities or because they simply assumed, in a face-saving fashion, that the statements must have been somewhat meaningful. The results of our research revealed that our respondents considered many bullshit statements as substantially more profound than the three statements by Voltaire, Einstein and Robinson.