Be aware next time a Facebook friend posts a seemingly inspirational quote that upon closer observation lacks intellectual sense. According to a recent study from the University of Waterloo, this may be indicative of their lack of intelligence.

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The study was published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making with an interesting title, "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit." According to the research, people who easily believe and follow pseudo-profound, intellectual-sounding 'bulls***' are less intelligent and less reflective. 

To complete the research, Ph.D. candidate Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers studied hundreds of subjects. These test participants were asked about their opinion on some pseudo-profound bullshit statements.

Researchers used phrases with no actual meaning and was created randomly for the test, like, "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty."

"Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure," the paper said.

The team used a website that randomly generates these pseudo-profound sentences from a group of non-related words. The results indicated that many participants failed to spot which are bulls***. 

Other tests exposed the participants with real-life bulls***, by asking them to read tweets posted by Deepak Chopra, a writer known for his New Age insights, and the computer-generated statements from the first test.

Researchers also studied the subjects' cognitive ability and a behavior called "ontological confusion", that is, when someone confuses one type of knowledge for another.

The study concluded that people who think bullshit-sounding statements are profound "are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability, i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy, are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine."

TagsScience of Bullshit, Bullshit, Gordon Pennycook