Relying on intuition increases receptivity to bullshit

Abstract

We experimentally examine the effect of intuitive thinking (via instructing to rely on first thought that comes to mind and implementing response time constraint) and reflective thinking (via instructing to rely on reason and not allowing to submit the response quickly) on perceived profundity of bullshit statements. In addition, we apply the same manipulations in elicitation of mundane statements and motivational quotes profundity. We find that relying on intuition results in significantly higher receptivity across all three statement categories. On the other hand, we find no significant effects of our reflective thinking manipulation. Finally, we find that bullshit receptivity is significantly higher in individuals who possess more epistemically suspect beliefs and lower in individuals with better analytic thinking.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.