People with the poorest bullshit detection performance grossly overestimate their detection abilities and significantly overplace those abilities compared to others

Littrell, Shane, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. 2021. “The ‘bullshit Blind Spot’: The Roles of Overconfidence and Perceived Information Processing in Bullshit Detection.” PsyArXiv. May 27. doi:10.31234/osf.io/kbfrz

Abstract: The growing prevalence of misinformation (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Though several cognitive and metacognitive variables have been found to be associated with a greater propensity to falling for bullshit, little attention has been paid to people’s perceptions of and confidence in their own ability to detect it and the phenomenology of the thinking processes they employ when evaluating misleading information. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between bullshit detection accuracy, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the poorest bullshit detection performance grossly overestimate their detection abilities and significantly overplace those abilities compared to others. Additionally, highly bullshit receptive people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. These results suggest that some people may have a “bullshit blind spot” and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects.