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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...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2018
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6067753 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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