Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Candidates

[beedle]

No surprise, Clinton supporters seem to sit high on the 'susceptible to BS' scale.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0153419#sec001

Abstract

The present research investigates the associations between holding favorable views of potential Democratic or Republican candidates for the US presidency 2016 and seeing profoundness in bullshit statements. In this contribution, bullshit is used as a technical term which is defined as communicative expression that lacks content, logic, or truth from the perspective of natural science. We used the Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR) to measure seeing profoundness in bullshit statements. The BSR scale contains statements that have a correct syntactic structure and seem to be sound and meaningful on first reading but are actually vacuous. Participants (N = 196; obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk) rated the profoundness of bullshit statements (using the BSR) and provided favorability ratings of three Democratic (Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders) and three Republican candidates for US president (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump). Participants also completed a measure of political liberalism/conservatism. Results revealed that favorable views of all three Republican candidates were positively related to judging bullshit statements as profound. The smallest correlation was found for Donald Trump. Although we observe a positive association between bullshit and support for the three Democrat candidates, this relationship is both substantively small and statistically insignificant. The general measure of political liberalism/conservatism was also related to judging bullshit statements as profound in that individuals who were more politically conservative had a higher tendency to see profoundness in bullshit statements. Of note, these results were not due to a general tendency among conservatives to see profoundness in everything: Favorable views of Republican candidates and conservatism were not significantly related to profoundness ratings of mundane statements. In contrast, this was the case for Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley. Overall, small-to-medium sized correlations were found, indicating that far from all conservatives see profoundness in bullshit statements.

[lindysalsagal]

1. Bernie supporters lowest by far. Cruise supporters highest by far. Hillary right behind him.

My "lowest" means least likely to perceive a b.s. statement as profound.

Bernie's supporters were many times lower than anyone else including Hillary's supporters. Conservatives as a group were the highest. Basically, it means conservatives are fools. But we knew that.

In other words, people agree with the speaker rather than understanding the meanings and implications of their words. Except for Bernie supporters: They think for themselves.

Don't attack until you follow the link and see the charts for yourself.

Really great study. Voters don't think: They feel. This explains frump: He's always saying people love him. It really doesn't matter what he says.