STUDY: People who lack intelligence tend to fall for nonsense inspirational quotes

“It can be difficult to know where to begin.”

Sounds mind-blowing, right? But if you found the statement pretty obvious and a mere collection of flowery bulls**t, chances are, you’re a fairly intelligent individual.

When Gordon Pennycook, who is currently studying for his PhD, stumbled upon a website called the New Age Bulls**t Generator (a website that randomly generates phony, but profound-sounding, quotes), he found it amusing, but it also got him wondering if people actually found such bulls**t quotes profound.

Pennycook got together with a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo at Ontario, Canada to test around 800 survey respondents to see how well people could separate the BS from the profound.

The research team used actual quotes tweeted by alternative medicine proponent and author Deepak Chopra, mixed with sayings randomly generated by the New Age Bulls**t Generator and a parody site called the Wisdom of Chopra.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Pennycook explained that “The basic idea is that people who are more intelligent should be better able to detect that the statements are bulls**t… And, similarly, that people that are more skeptical about supernatural claims should be more skeptical about the bulls**t that we presented to them.”

Pennycook further explained that for the purposes of the study, specified that “Bulls**t, in contrast to mere nonsense, is something that implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth.”

Although most of the respondents were able to separate mundane statements from the profound ones, the study showed that more than 20% of participants had a hard time doing so. The study further found that the less intelligent respondents also tended to have strong religious beliefs, were non-reflective and had the penchant for entertaining paranormal beliefs, conspiracy theories, and alternative medicine philosophies.

Penycook’s study entitled, On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bulls**t, was published in the November issue of the Judgment and Decision Making journal.