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I loved this article on people who believe bullshit. I'm not sure exactly which Q forum is most appropriate but it seems clearly topical. The science shows that people who believe bullshit are stupid.
In a recent study in Judgment and Decision Making, a team led by Gordon Pennycook, a Ph.D. student in psychology at the University of Waterloo, dug into (sorry) one particularly common type of bullshit: “pseudo-profound bullshit,” or “seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous.”
Summarizing the results, Pennycook, et al., write that “[people] more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to … conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”
This makes some degree of intuitive sense — to the extent all these characteristics can be swept under the same umbrella, that umbrella would be marked “not very skeptical.”
So, in other words they have absent or defective bullshit detectors.
The fact that you sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that the “Law of Gravity” is unconstitutional and a violation of your sovereign rights, does not absolve you of adherence to it.
Walter Quattrociocchi, the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca in Italy, has spent several years studying how conspiracy theories and misinformation spread online, and he confirmed some of my fears: Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.
