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Political Bullshit Receptivity and Its Correlates: a Cross-Cultural Validation of The

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POLITICAL BULLSHIT RECEPTIVITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY Political bullshit receptivity and its correlates: a cross-cultural validation of the concept Vukašin Gligorić1, Allard R. Feddes, & Bertjan Doosje Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Draft version: 26/10/2020 This is an unpublished manuscript that has been submitted for publication. Contents may change prior to publication Conflict of Interest: Authors have no conflict of interest. 1 Corresponding author: Vukašin Gligorić, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 129B 1018 WS Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-7528-6806 Email: [email protected] 1 POLITICAL BULLSHIT RECEPTIVITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY Abstract Frankfurt defined persuasive communication that has no regard for truth, knowledge, or evidence as bullshit. Although there has been a lot of psychological research on pseudo-profound bullshit, no study examined this type of communication in politics. In the present research, we operationalize political bullshit receptivity as endorsing vague political statements, slogans, and political bullshit programs. We investigated the relationship of these three measures with pseudo-profound bullshit, ideology (political ideology, support for neoliberalism), populism, and voting behavior. Three pre-registered studies in different cultural settings (the United States, Serbia, The Netherlands; total N = 534) yielded medium to high intercorrelations between political bullshit measures and pseudo-profound bullshit, and good construct validity (hypothesized one-factor solution). A Bayesian meta-analysis showed that all political bullshit measures positively correlated with support for the free market, while only some positively correlated with social (political statements and programs) and economic conservatism (programs), and populism (programs). In the U.S., higher receptivity to political bullshit was associated with a higher probability that one voted for Trump (vs Clinton) in the past and higher intentions to vote for Trump (vs Biden and Sanders). In the Netherlands, higher receptivity to political bullshit predicted the intention to vote for the conservative-liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. Exploratory analyses on merged datasets showed that higher receptivity to political bullshit was associated with a higher probability to vote for right-wing candidates/parties and lower probability for the left-wing ones. Overall, political bullshit endorsement showed good validity, opening avenues for research in political communication, especially when this communication is broad and meaningless. Keywords: pseudo-profound bullshit, bullshit, political bullshit, ideology, voting 2 POLITICAL BULLSHIT RECEPTIVITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY Introduction “That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.” Noam Chomsky (1991, p. 21-22) As Chomsky noted about the political realm, political communication has become sloganized and essentially meaningless to a certain extent. Consider the on-going, 2020 U.S. presidential elections: Joe Biden believes that “America is an Idea”, while Donald Trump asserts that he would “Keep America great”. Although these statements seem to convey some meaning, they are too broad and vague to be tested for trustworthiness or evidence. Yet, they aim to persuade voters. Although prevalent, this political communication has not been investigated empirically. In the present paper, we present theoretical and empirical evidence for receptivity to this type of communication which we label “political bullshit” following previous work on pseudo-profound bullshit (Pennycook et al., 2015). Frankfurt (1986/2005) was the first to outline the persuasive communication that was constructed without regard for truth, knowledge, or evidence. He noted the prevalence of this phenomenon and named it bullshit, launching an upsurge in academic work on the topic (Law, 2011; Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006). In his seminal essay “On Bullshit”, he made a clear distinction between bullshit and lies; while liars care about the truth in the sense of hiding it, bullshitters have no regard for it (Frankfurt, 1986/2005). Therefore, whenever one speaks on a topic with no knowledge about it, that person is engaging in bullshitting (Petrocelli, 2018). 3 POLITICAL BULLSHIT RECEPTIVITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY Crucially, it is the speaker’s intention (i.e., how it is produced), and not recipients’ interpretation that qualifies something as bullshit (Pennycook et al., 2015; Pennycook et al., 2016). Pseudo-profound bullshit Although bullshit has been extensively discussed in philosophy (Carson, 2016), it has been only recently investigated by psychologists. Specifically, Pennycook and colleagues (2015) focused on one type of bullshitpseudo-profound bullshitwhich represents a collection of pompous words that have syntactical structure, but no actual meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Comparing the pseudo-profound bullshit to vague messages that New Age figures try to convey, Pennycook and colleagues (2015) showed that endorsement of this type of bullshit is related to lower analytical and higher intuitive thinking style, higher religiosity, and paranormal beliefs. These findings were later replicated (Čavojová et al., 2019) and extended, showing that people susceptible to pseudo-profound bullshit are also more prone to conspiratorial and schizotypal ideations (Hart & Graether, 2018), apophenia (i.e., set of unusual experiences and magical thinking; Bainbridge et al., 2019), illusory pattern perception (Walker et al., 2019), use of essential oils (Ackerman & Chopik, 2020), and less prosocial behavior (Erlandsson et al., 2018). Focusing on contextual factors, research showed that attributing pseudo-profound bullshit to a famous person increases perceived profundity (Gligorić & Vilotijević, 2019), while bullshit titles increase perceived profundity of abstract art (Turpin et al., 2019). Given that pseudo-profound bullshit might be only one type of bullshit (Pennycook et al., 2015), there have been attempts to measure bullshit other than pseudo-profound; for example, Evans and colleagues (2020) measured scientific bullshit (assembling random words from physics glossary), while Čavojeva and colleagues (2020) tried to measure general bullshit (i.e., 4 POLITICAL BULLSHIT RECEPTIVITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY no abstract buzzwords). Endorsement of both types of bullshit showed to be highly correlated with the receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit (rs = .60 and .83 respectively). Another empirical line of research on bullshit focused on bullshitting as an act (i.e., producer), rather than on the bullshit as a product (i.e. receptivity). For example, Petrocelli (2018) showed that bullshitting occurs more when one has to provide an opinion and when one can get away with bullshitting easier. Similarly, Littrel and colleagues (2020) focused on the frequency with which individuals engage in bullshitting, measuring two aspects of it: persuasive and evasive. While the formers’ function is to persuade, impress, and achieve acceptance of others, the latter has the aim to avoid giving direct answers and evade any thorough inquiry. They also showed that people who engage in bullshitting tend to engage more in overclaiming, are less honest and sincere, and have a lower cognitive ability (Littrel et al., 2020). However, the dominant approach remains the one on the reception of pseudo-profound bullshit. More importantly for the present research, some studies investigated the relationship with political affinity. Pseudo-profound bullshit and political affinities. Several studies demonstrated the relationship between ideological stances and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit. These discovered that, in the U.S., neoliberals (i.e., supporters of the free-market politics; Sterling et al., 2016), Republican supporters, and conservatives are more susceptible to pseudo-profound bullshit (Pfattheicher & Schindler, 2016). The findings for the free-market supporters, economic and social conservatism were later replicated (Evans et al., 2020), though again in a U.S. sample. This relationship fits well within ideological asymmetries between conservatives and liberals in epistemic motivation so that conservatives rely more on intuitive thinking style, heuristic and simple information processing (e.g., Jost, 2017; Jost et al., 2016). However, the relationship between ideology and pseudo-profound bullshit has not been found consistently: for example, 5 POLITICAL BULLSHIT RECEPTIVITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY Hart and Graether (2018) found a positive relationship with conservatism only in the first study. Additionally, no consistent evidence was found for a relation with neoliberalism as the findings were not successfully replicated on a Serbian sample (Gligorić & Vilotijević, 2020). Some authors also criticized the analyses Sterling and colleagues performed (i.e., the use of quadratic regression which increases the rate of false positives; Simonsohn, 2018). Indeed, it seems that the relationship between ideology and pseudo-profound bullshit is more complex: Nilsson and colleagues (2019) found a positive relationship with social conservatism within a Swedish sample but failed to replicate one with economic ideological preference. They also found that economical centrist (and even leftist) were
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