People often overestimate their understanding of how things work. For instance, people believe that they can explain even ordinary phenomena such as the operation of zippers and speedometers in greater depth than they really can. This is called the illusion of explanatory depth. Fortunately, a person can expose the illusion by attempting to generate a causal explanation for how the phenomenon operates (e.g., how a zipper works). This might be because explanation makes salient the gaps in a person’s knowledge of that phenomenon. However, recent evidence suggests that people might be able to expose the illusion by instead explaining a different phenomenon. Across three preregistered experiments, we tested whether the process of explaining one phenomenon (e.g., how a zipper works) would lead someone to report knowing less about a completely different phenomenon (e.g., how snow forms). In each experiment, we found that attempting to explain one phenomenon led participants to report knowing less about various phenomena. For example, participants reported knowing less about how snow forms after attempting to explain how a zipper works. We discuss alternative accounts of the illusion of explanatory depth that might better fit our results. We also consider the utility of explanation as an indirect, non-confrontational debiasing method in which a person generalizes a feeling of ignorance about one phenomenon to their knowledge base more generally.

Previous research has revealed that intuitive confidence is an important predictor of how people choose between an intuitive and non-intuitive alternative when faced with information that opposes the intuitive response. In the current study, we investigated the speed of intuition generation as a predictor of intuitive confidence and participant choice in choice conflict situations. Participants predicted the outcomes of several National Basketball Association games, both with and without reference to a point spread. As hypothesized, the faster participants were to predict the outright winner of a game (i.e., generate an intuition) the more likely they were to predict the favourite against the point spread for that game (i.e., endorse the intuitive response). Overall, our findings are consistent with the notion that the speed of intuition generation acts as a determinant of intuitive confidence and a predictor of choice in situations featuring equally valid intuitive and non-intuitive alternatives.

While they usually should, people do not revise their beliefs more to expert (economist) opinion than to lay opinion. The present research sought to better understand the factors that make it more likely for an individual to change their mind when faced with the opinions of expert economists versus the general public. Across five studies we examined the role that overestimation of knowledge plays in this behavior. We replicated the finding that people fail to privilege the opinion of experts over the public across two different (Study 1) and five different (Study 5) economic issues. We further find that undermining an illusion of both topic-relevant (Studies 2–4) and -irrelevant knowledge (Studies 3 and 4) leads to greater normative belief revision in response to expert rather than lay opinion. We suggest one reason that people fail to revise their beliefs more in response to experts is because people think they know more than they really do.

Three experiments (N = 550) examined the effect of an interval construction elicitation method used in several expert elicitation studies on judgment accuracy. Participants made judgments about topics that were either searchable or unsearchable online using one of two order variations of the interval construction procedure. One group of participants provided their best judgment (one step) prior to constructing an interval (i.e., lower bound, upper bound, and a confidence rating that the correct value fell in the range provided), whereas another group of participants provided their best judgment last, after the three-step confidence interval was constructed. The overall effect of this elicitation method was not significant in 8 out of 9 univariate tests. Moreover, the calibration of confidence intervals was not affected by elicitation order. The findings warrant skepticism regarding the benefit of prior confidence interval construction for improving judgment accuracy.

Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. We find support for this prediction across three experiments (N = 627) and four distinct measures of pattern perception. We further demonstrate that this observed relation is restricted to illusory pattern perception, with participants displaying greater endorsement of non-illusory patterns being no more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. Additionally, this relation is not a product of a general proclivity to rate all statements as profound and is not accounted for by individual differences in analytic thinking. Overall, we demonstrate that individuals with a tendency to go beyond the available data such that they uncritically endorse patterns where no patterns exist are also more likely to create and endorse false-meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. These findings are discussed in the context of a proposed framework that views individuals’ receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit as, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive process: that of pattern perception.

We investigated whether the personal importance of objects influences utilitarian decision-making in which damaging property is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome. In Experiment 1, participants judged saving five objects by destroying a sixth object to be less acceptable when the action required destroying the sixth object directly (rather than as a side-effect) and the objects were personally important (rather than unimportant). In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that utilitarian judgments were not influenced by the objects’ monetary worth. Together these findings suggest that personal importance underlies people’s sensitivity to damaging property as a means for utilitarian gains.

When people have invested resources into an endeavor, they typically persist in it, even when it becomes obvious that it will fail. Here we show this bias extends to people’s moral decision-making. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 1592) we show that people are more willing to proceed with a futile, immoral action when costs have been sunk (Experiment 1A and 1B). Moreover, we show that sunk costs distort people’s perception of morality by increasing how acceptable they find actions that have received past investment (Experiment 2). We find these results in contexts where continuing would lead to no obvious benefit and only further harm. We also find initial evidence that the bias has a larger impact on judgment in immoral compared to non-moral contexts. Our findings illustrate a novel way that the past can affect moral judgment. Implications for rational moral judgment and models of moral cognition are discussed.

Individuals often assess themselves as being less susceptible to common biases compared to others. This bias blind spot (BBS) is thought to represent a metacognitive error. In this research, we tested three explanations for the effect: The cognitive sophistication hypothesis posits that individuals who display the BBS more strongly are actually less biased than others. The introspection bias hypothesis posits that the BBS occurs because people rely on introspection more when assessing themselves compared to others. The conversational processes hypothesis posits that the effect is largely a consequence of the pragmatic aspects of the experimental situation rather than true metacognitive error. In two experiments (N = 1057) examining 18 social/motivational and cognitive biases, there was strong evidence of the BBS. Among the three hypotheses examined, the conversational processes hypothesis attracted the greatest support, thus raising questions about the extent to which the BBS is a metacognitive effect.

Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8), and no titles. Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of computer-generated abstract art, compared to when no titles were present (Study 1). Mundane titles did not enhance the perception of profoundness, indicating that pseudo-profound bullshit titles specifically (as opposed to titles in general) enhance the perceived profoundness of abstract art (Study 2). Furthermore, these effects generalize to artist-created abstract art (Study 3). Finally, we report a large correlation between profoundness ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit and “International Art English” statements (Study 4), a mode and style of communication commonly employed by artists to discuss their work. This correlation suggests that these two independently developed communicative modes share underlying cognitive mechanisms in their interpretations. We discuss the potential for these results to be integrated into a larger, new theoretical framework of bullshit as a low-cost strategy for gaining advantages in prestige awarding domains.

In considering moral dilemmas, people often judge the acceptability of exchanging individuals’ interests, rights, and even lives. Here we investigate the related, but often overlooked, question of how people decide who to sacrifice in a moral dilemma. In three experiments (total N = 558), we provide evidence that these decisions often depend on the feeling that certain people are fungible and interchangeable with one another, and that one factor that leads people to be viewed this way is shared nationality. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read vignettes in which three individuals’ lives could be saved by sacrificing another person. When the individuals were characterized by their nationalities, participants chose to save the three endangered people by sacrificing someone who shared their nationality, rather than sacrificing someone from a different nationality. Participants do not show similar preferences, though, when individuals were characterized by their age or month of birth. In Experiment 3, we replicated the effect of nationality on participant’s decisions about who to sacrifice, and also found that they did not show a comparable preference in a closely matched vignette in which lives were not exchanged. This suggests that the effect of nationality on decisions of who to sacrifice may be specific to judgments about exchanges of lives.

In reply to Dalton (2016), we argue that bullshit is defined in terms of how it is produced, not how it is interpreted. We agree that it can be interpreted as profound by some readers (and assumed as much in the original paper). Nonetheless, we present additional evidence against the possibility that more reflective thinkers are more inclined to interpret bullshit statements as profound.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health guidance (e.g., regarding the use of non-medical masks) changed over time. Although many revisions were a result of gains in scientific understanding, we nonetheless hypothesized that making changes in guidance salient would negatively affect evaluations of experts and health-protective intentions. In Study 1 (N = 300), we demonstrate that describing COVID-19 guidance in terms of inconsistency (versus consistency) leads people to perceive scientists and public health authorities less favorably (e.g., as less expert). For participants in Canada (n = 190), though not the U.S. (n = 110), making guidance change salient also reduced intentions to download a contact tracing app. In Study 2 (N = 1399), we show that a brief forewarning intervention mitigates detrimental effects of changes in guidance. In the absence of forewarning, emphasizing inconsistency harmed judgments of public health authorities and reduced health-protective intentions, but forewarning eliminated this effect.

Does one’s stance toward evidence evaluation and belief revision have relevance for actual beliefs? We investigate the role of endorsing an actively open-minded thinking style about evidence (AOT-E) on a wide range of beliefs, values, and opinions. Participants indicated the extent to which they think beliefs (Study 1) or opinions (Studies 2 and 3) ought to change according to evidence on an 8-item scale. Across three studies with 1,692 participants from two different sources (Mechanical Turk and Lucid for Academics), we find that our short AOT-E scale correlates negatively with beliefs about topics ranging from extrasensory perception, to respect for tradition, to abortion, to God; and positively with topics ranging from anthropogenic global warming to support for free speech on college campuses. More broadly, the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence was robustly associated with political liberalism, the rejection of traditional moral values, the acceptance of science, and skepticism about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial claims. However, we also find that AOT-E is more strongly predictive for political liberals (Democrats) than conservatives (Republicans). We conclude that socio-cognitive theories of belief (both specific and general) should take into account people’s beliefs about when and how beliefs should change – that is, meta-beliefs – but that further work is required to understand how meta-beliefs about evidence interact with political ideology.

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.