Openness/Intellect and Susceptibility to Pseudo–Profound Bullshit: A Replication and Extension
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Pseudo–profound bullshit’ (PPBS) is a class of meaningless statements designed to appear profound. Profundity ratings for PPBS have been found to be negatively related to analytical thinking and positively related to epistemically suspect beliefs (e.g. belief in the paranormal). Conceptually similar traits within the Openness/Intellect (O/I) domain form a simplex, whereby traits are arranged along a single dimension from intelligence to apophenia (i.e. observing patterns or causal connections were none exist). Across two studies (total N = 297), we attempted to replicate the O/I simplex and determine how it relates to perceiving PPBS as profound. Participants completed questionnaires measuring traits from the O/I simplex and provided profundity ratings for PPBS. Profundity ratings of PPBS tended to correlate negatively with intelligence and positively with apophenia. The association with intelligence generally reflected a greater ability to discriminate the profound from the pseudo–profound, whereas the association with apophenia reflected poorer discrimination in Study 1, with less conclusive results in Study 2. In both studies, the O/I simplex was closely replicated. The results suggest a link between the O/I domain and perceiving PPBS as profound and tentatively support the theory that intelligence may protect against apophenia. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".