Five degrees of (non)sense: Investigating the connection between bullshit receptivity and susceptibility to semantic illusions

Abstract

Individual differences in people’s tendency to see bullshit statements such as Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth as meaningful and possibly profound have become an active topic of research in judgment and decision making in recent years. However, (psycho)linguistics has so far paid little attention to the topic, despite its obvious appeal for language processing research. I present an experiment that investigated possible shared traits contributing to individual bullshit receptivity and susceptibility to semantic illusions, which occur when compositionally incongruous sentences receive plausible but unlicensed interpretations (e.g., More people have been to Russia than I have). The results show relatively little indication of an individual-level tendency to both fall for bullshit and for linguistic illusions. Implications for future psycholinguistic research into bullshit processing are discussed.