People who frequently try to impress or persuade others with misleading exaggerations and distortions are themselves more likely to be fooled by impressive-sounding misinformation, new research from the University of Waterloo shows. The researchers found that people who frequently engage in “persuasive bullshitting” were actually quite poor at identifying it. Specifically,
    • otp@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      2 years ago

      Some of those BS things are actually pretty difficult. I mean, the “motivational quotes” sound like nonsense, but the fake science things don’t sound especially fake to me (who has almost no understanding of physics).

      Even the headlines didn’t sound especially outrageous, given the kinds of headlines we can easily find today. Though anything “serious”, I’d probably fact check or look for a more reliable source, lol

    • Endward23@futurology.todayEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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.

  • solarvector@lemmy.zip
    7·
    2 years ago

    Maybe because they’re naive enough to assume that just because they’re lying bastards they can tell when other people are.

  • OlPatchy2Eyes@lemmy.world
    41·
    2 years ago

    Well sure, the BSers are insecure and deep down believe that other people are more impressive than them, so they believe others’ BS. That’s why they feel the need to BS in order to stack up. If they were secure with themselves then they would notice that other BSers are, well, BSing.

  • pudcollar@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 years ago

    They say “never shit a shitter”, but apparently it should be “always shit a shitter”.

  • Endward23@futurology.todayEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    I really hope this impressiv and “scientific sounding” headline is more than just another example of the named effect. ;-)

    In a series of studies conducted with over 800 participants from the US and Canada, the researchers examined the relations between participants’ self-reported engagement in both types of BSing and their ratings of how profound, truthful, or accurate they found pseudo-profound and pseudo-scientific statements and fake news headlines.

    Selfreporting. And this 800 participants, where are they from? Students?