People more receptive to bullshit grossly overestimate their ability to detect it and believe they are better able to detect it than others (i.e., “bullshit blind spot”)

A bullshit blind spot? Dunning-Kruger effects in bullshit detection. Shane Littrell and Jonathan Fugelsang. Waterloo Univ., Jan 2021. https://dlab.sauder.ubc.ca/sjdm/presentations/2020-Poster-Littrell-Shane-BullshitDetect-DunningKruger-Blindspot.pdf

Rolf Degen's take: "People least able to detect bullshit believe they are better at it than everyone else. https://t.co/DQhx0t4kme https://t.co/fknlV8iPgO"

Background

• People are often confident that they are not easily misled (i.e., they have good “bullshit

detectors”). However, their BS detection confidence may not relate to their actual ability.

• Past work has shown that people who engage in bullshitting more frequently are

metacognitively less able to distinguish bullshit from non-bullshit, suggesting that some

people may be unaware of their susceptibility to misleading information.

• We examined the extent to which a person’s confidence in their BS detection abilities is

related to actual accuracy on a BS detection task as well as how they feel their detection

ability compares to the ability of others.

• We also examined the associations of these variables with bullshitting frequency and

intelligence.

• We followed up in Study 2 by investigating whether one’s bullshit detection ability is

perceived to be an intuitive or reflective process.