Individuals who claim knowledge/expertise where they have little experience or skill exhibit high levels of overconfidence, believe they work hard, persevere at tasks, & are popular

Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Known about Their Lives? John Jerrim, Phil Parke, rNikki Shure. IZA DP No. 12282. http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf

‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining teenagers’ propensity to claim expertise in three mathematics constructs that do not really exist. Using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from nine Anglophone countries and over 40,000 young people, we find substantial differences in young people’s tendency to bullshit across countries, genders and socio-economic groups. Bullshitters are also found to exhibit high levels of overconfidence and believe they work hard, persevere at tasks, and are popular amongst their peers. Together this provides important new insight into who bullshitters are and the type of survey responses that they provide.