Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

A simple self-experiment if you haven't read the paper, find which of these sentences are bullshit. Answer in order without reading further ahead, and don't go back to change your answers (as to replicate experimental conditions).

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1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence.

2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.

3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seeking person.

4. You are not only responsible for the things you say, but also for the things that you do not say.

5. Health and tolerance provides creativity for the future.

6. We have other flaws before our eyes, but our own flaws behind our back.

7. Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in.

8. Your movement transforms universal observations.

9. The person who never made a mistake never tried something new.

10. The whole silence infinite phenomena.

11. Imagined pain does not hurt less because it is imagined.

12. The invisible is beyond all new immutability.

13. The unexplainable touches on the inherent experiences of the universe.

14. It is one thing to be tempted, but quite another to fall for the temptation.

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Here are the answers for self-assessment: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=l...

No claim is made on the validity of the experiment (the researchers' or your own). Proposed in the name of curiosity!

I feel like this is some meta-level test for the reader.

Pseudo-profound bullshit statement: "Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"; can the reader distinguish this bullshit paper from a profound paper?

Scientists! I offer my services as an author of better bullshit than you can create by feeding a parody generator with marketing materials. Observe!

- The unknown flees from the implausible.

- Unheard elephants are never green.

- Although many people seek apples, few seek the road.

- Judgement is like chewing on expensive rubber.

- A circle is a square with intention.

Wow, the interpretations of these statements in these comments is hilarious. Is everyone on Hacker News Dwight Schrute?

I am slightly confused by the selection of those sentences, the bullshit sentences barely make grammatical sense, while the profound sentences are honestly pretty banal and sound like things you'd find written on tote-bags sold in etsy stores.

I found the study pretty interesting especially table 2 is extremely informative!

>> Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”).

Why is the second sentence "profound"? If I were to say it sounds like bullshit to me (it actually kind of does?) what would be the counter-argument, other than "we asked X people and the majority felt it was a profound statement" (equally, a bullshit statement)?

I reckon there is no concrete way to formalise the meaning of "bullshit" and "profundity". One person's bullshit statement can easily bee another's profound wisdom ("turn the other cheek" - bullshit, or profound? "Live and let live" - bullshit, or profound? etc).

So what exactly is the point of trying to predict behaviour from observations about subjective quantities? What exactly is being claimed here? That if I have a strong view about what is bullshit and what is not, I can predict how people will behave?

I don't know if they mention it in the article, but those BS quotes are eerily similar to those generated by http://wisdomofchopra.com/ and I think that might have been what they used.

Surely those questions are just a reading comprehension test? I.e. can you read some difficult and somewhat abstract sentences and see if they have any rational (metaphorical or whatev) meaning?

They correlate because the root cause of identifying them is reading comprehension.

And for people who have a bit of trouble with the comprehension, the pessimistic "this is just bs" way of throwing up one's hands and giving up is correlated with non-social behavior. Meh.

> Health and tolerance provides creativity for the future.

This one is classified bullshit, although I think it makes at least somewhat sense.

I am considering a Feynman detector for bullshit (as defined in the article): See if you can come up with a specific example that the sentence describes. If you can a point to a specific example which works, the sentence is not bullshit.

Feynman famously used this technique to understand and quickly find flaws in complex mathematical theories - he followed a specific example along.

Anyway, back to the article; I am not clear, maybe both seeing through bullshit and being pro-social are correlated to general intelligence?