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I receive the Bright's Bulletin from The Brights Net (http://www.the-brights.net/) (A "bright" (n.) is a person whose worldview is naturalistic (no supernatural and mystical elements)) and the December issue highlights an article from the Journal of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM): On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
From the Bulletin:
Receptivity for "Bullshit" Scrutinized
The authors of a recent article in the Journal of Judgment and Decisionmaking do not hold back. Having considered "nonsense" and "rubbish" inadequate to the phenomenon of interest, they deem "bullshit" a consequential aspect of the human condition and set about to put at least one type of it under empirical investigation.
Titling their report, "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit," they define the attribute as "seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous."
After pursuing 4 different studies regarding bullshit detection, the authors conclude, among other things:
"[W]ith the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before."... [S]ome people are more receptive to this type of bullshit" and "[D]etecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims."
The study is serious, but reading it is likely to bring chuckles to many Brights who would like to think that Deepak Chopra would not be pleased by the scrutiny.
The article:
http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
or
http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html*
I'm not sure which is more newsworthy: the article contents or the fact that "bullshit" is a mainstream English word now!
*Update: 12/14 14:18 GMT by mrcoolbp : I updated the second link as per the submitter
(Score: 3, Funny) by number6 on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:37PM
ON BULLSHIT - Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University (1986)
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much
bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we
tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of
their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the
phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much
sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what
bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a
conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we
have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding
of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical
analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is
simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it
is not, or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the
structure of its concept. Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both
necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat
arbitrary. For one thing, the expression EXOOVKLW is often employed quite loosely—
simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For
another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and
perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean. Nonetheless it
should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be
decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain,
after all, not only unanswered but unasked. So far as I am aware, very little work
has been done on this subject. I have not undertaken a survey of the literature,
partly because I do not know how to go about it. To be sure, there is one quite
obvious place to look [...]
Free legal links to the whole book [PDF]:
__http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
__http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf
__https://robustfiles.com/dl.php?key=/n9P1/Frankfurt-1986.pdf