Editor's note (Friends WeChat ID: yosumn):
No one believes in nonsense. If there are too many people talking, it becomes the truth. I don’t know if you have noticed such a phenomenon. Some people are especially good at expressing unverified personal insights in the tone of saying absolute truth. When you look closely, some views are even contradictory. In such a situation, it seems very necessary to study the "nonsense psychology". Before reading
, maybe your definition of nonsense is different from that of the author, and you are confident that you can see through those nonsense at a glance. That's great! In this way, when you learn that 98% of people are not as good as they think, they may really start to learn to be modest about their own perception. After all, nonsense in some areas is about life. For example, when it is used to spread reports about disease, health, trauma, depression, suicide, etc., when others believe the "authoritative" remarks without scrutiny, you can think of one more step.
We live in an era constructed by the torrent of information, which means that everyone's life is also full of countless lies. You may have heard more nonsense in this week than ordinary ancestors thousands of years ago in their lifetime. If the words in academic works before the Enlightenment were added up one by one, this total number would be pale and powerless compared to the number of words used to speak nonsense online in the 21st century.
See this, if you find yourself nodding, start shaking your head quickly. I'm just talking nonsense now.
How could I guess how many unorganized nonsense you have heard this week? What if you happen to read this article on the first day of the week? Moreover, who was the "ordinary ancestor" who lived thousands of years ago? How could I know how many lies he has to deal with in his life?
constructs a nonsense like the beginning of a paragraph, which is easy to deal with. Once you only need to hint that you leave a certain impression instead of clearly imparting what knowledge you have, the burden on my shoulders will be lighter and the responsibility will be transferred to your shoulders. My open-minded remarks are likely to be true, but we will never be able to confirm this.
So, how true is the opening remark of this article? I, the nonsense person, don’t care.
According to Harry Frankfurt, honorary professor and philosopher at Princeton University, bullshit is something that is constructed without facts. It is different from lying. Lies are to disintegrate the facts, so they are closely related to the facts. But nonsense is especially poisonous. is because the nonsense people choose a special position, so the way of speaking is very flexible. For the nonsense person, it doesn’t matter whether he is right or wrong. The important thing is that you are paying attention to him.
So how do we use empirical research on to study "nonsense"? Let us take the Twitter of the famous alternative medical advocate and theist Chopra to give an example:
The mechanism of the disease: purpose, separation, focus on allowing the possibility of juxtaposition #Cosmic Consciousness, centered in being allowed juxtaposition of possibilities to unfold #CosmicConsciousness
As sentient beings of light, we are here and not here, both limited by time and eternal, both real and possible. #Consciousness of the universe#
As beings of light we are local and non-local, time bound and timeless actuality and possibility #CosmicConsciousness
Because I can't understand what Chopra wants to say, it's really hard to tell if such a Twitter is nonsense. The words Chopra selected were so complicated that they were unnecessary and they mean nothing. Maybe Twitter has become a place to show off rather than speak well, and the vague expression is probably developed by Chopra to be a means of pretending to be profound.
Of course, this is just my personal opinion. Some people must think these remarks are very profound. Which onion am I? Can I actually say they are nonsense?
OK, I just did an empirical study on nonsense, and the results are clear at a glance.My colleague and I recently published this paper, with the topic of "Pretending to Become a Superb Nonsense" .
Before you understand the interesting research results, you can reminisce about a few similar words:
The invisible is beyond new timelessness.
What transcends the new eternity is an invisible thing.
As you self-actualise, you will enter into infinite empathy that transcends understanding.
When you realize yourself, you will enter into a world of infinite "empathy", which has transcends understanding.
These expressions are absolutely, certainly, just nonsense. I dare to draw a conclusion so directly because they are randomly generated by two websites, wisdomofchopra.com and New Age Bullshit Generator, which randomly draw current words and use them to form sentences. And these sentences are meaningless, they just use vague expressions to cover up the empty inner world.
From four experiments studying nonsense, we found that some people always think that these obviously nonsense sentences have some profound meanings to some extent. The most important part of the research results is that people with higher bullshit receptivity are more common among people who perform worse on various cognitive and thinking style tests, or who believe in religion and supernatural powers.
In other words, people with more logical analysis skills, skepticism and critical thinking are less likely to feel how profound those nonsense are. Maybe you have guessed this result.
as a comparison, we attached positive quotes with straightforward and simple expressions and clear meanings (for example: water drops wear away a stone, not because of how powerful the water is, but because of its persistence). Surprisingly, more than 20% of subjects felt that the randomly generated fancy sentences were deeper than these classic quotes with plain words, but these people also scored lower on the "thought style" test, indicating that they were a group of people who often made decisions based on intuitive reactions.
What about the nonsense written by real people like Chopra?
To be honest, one of the websites we use to generate sentences (wisdomofchopra.com) actually included words directly from Chopra's Twitter, so we let the subjects read some of Chopra's original Twitter without knowing it. The style of the website is like this
The result is that although people agree that his Twitter is slightly deeper than randomly generated sentences, the Twitter sentences are extremely correlated with randomly generated nonsense, and the two are related to the same psychological factors. In layman's terms, it is almost impossible to distinguish the difference between Chopra's Twitter and nonsense from a psychological perspective.
As far as I know, this is the first empirical investigation about "nonsense". But it is just the tip of the iceberg, relative to the vast world of nonsense. Advertising, politics, tabloids - When you look carefully, the nonsense suddenly comes up from every corner. Our research is quite funny, but nonsense is worth taking seriously. Chopra's tweeting lilac poems may not have any consequences, but her attitude of indifferent to the truth and ignoring whether she speaks rigorously has a profound impact.
Imagine what would happen if I talk nonsense in the health field where right and wrong are complicated and difficult to distinguish. Cardiac surgeon and American TV host Mohamud Oz once used his professional qualifications to promote affordable "gaga therapy" on TV, but the investigation found that more than half of the things he promoted on the show were unverified and purely untrusted information.
When the Senate subcommittee asked him why he claimed that a large number of untested drugs were "magic drugs", he responded: "My work on TV is just a cheerleader for the audience." Now even he himself admitted how much water the show was mixed with. He only cares about how committed the audience is, no matter how reliable his words are. However, the audience took everything he said seriously, hoping to become healthier.When health needs are at stake, shouldn’t the facts and truth attract more attention?
Nowadays, some niche alternative therapy advocates particularly like to advocate "open-mindedness", but unfortunately, this tone can easily ignore the empirical results.
Most of the people who initiated the "anti-vaccine campaign" that year were non-medical professionals, and they didn't seem to care. A short article in the medical journal "The Lancet" in 1988 that hinted that the MMR vaccine may be related to autism had been criticized for a long time and was withdrawn from publication.
Even if the experts explain this directly to them later, they cannot dissuade those who are deeply poisoned by the nonsense of "opposing vaccination". This situation led to the reinvasion of diseases such as measles and mumps in the United States. According to statistics from at least one website, since 2007, 9,000 people in missed the opportunity to prevent the vaccine and eventually lost their lives. nonsense is not a joke, but a serious matter.
Frankfurt marked in his book "About the Nonsense" that "most people are quite confident in their ability to distinguish nonsense and not be fooled." But the result is that more than 98% of the subjects evaluated at least one randomly generated nonsense as "a bit profound". We are not as good at detecting nonsense as we imagined.
So, readers, what do you have to do to be immune to nonsense? If you are a person who does not believe in gods and supernatural powers, it may be easier to detect that Chopra or Oz's words are just for selling books and increasing ratings. But think about the first paragraph at the beginning - When nonsense is similar to our own ideas, it is difficult for you to recognize it again.
Perhaps the first and most important step to see through nonsense is to identify the limitations of our own cognition. Be humble in your abilities and constantly correct our beliefs. This is the key to a critical mental model—and critical thinking is the only hope to live well in a world full of nonsense.
-end-
Translator: Kemei
Bachelor of Psychology at Wuhan University
Zhihu Column @Literary Mammals
Original Author: Gordon Pennycook
Doctoral candidate at the University of Waterloo. Interested in the dual processing theory of reasoning decisions
original link:
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-bullshit-is-no-laughing-matter
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