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Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

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”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to ot...

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Autores principales: Erlandsson, Arvid, Nilsson, Artur, Tinghög, Gustav, Västfjäll, Daniel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6067753/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30063739
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201474
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author Erlandsson, Arvid
Nilsson, Artur
Tinghög, Gustav
Västfjäll, Daniel
author_facet Erlandsson, Arvid
Nilsson, Artur
Tinghög, Gustav
Västfjäll, Daniel
author_sort Erlandsson, Arvid
collection PubMed
description 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”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.
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spelling pubmed-60677532018-08-10 Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior Erlandsson, Arvid Nilsson, Artur Tinghög, Gustav Västfjäll, Daniel PLoS One Research Article 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”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial. Public Library of Science 2018-07-31 /pmc/articles/PMC6067753/ /pubmed/30063739 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201474 Text en © 2018 Erlandsson et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Erlandsson, Arvid
Nilsson, Artur
Tinghög, Gustav
Västfjäll, Daniel
Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
title Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
title_full Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
title_fullStr Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
title_full_unstemmed Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
title_short Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
title_sort bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6067753/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30063739
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201474
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