Bij nader inzien past-ie inderdaad beter hier:
quote:
Ever get annoyed by people on social media who share 'profound' quotes, or use meaningless, intelligent-sounding soundbites in arguments?
A new study has shown that there is a link between these people and low intelligence.
It found that those who are receptive to pseudo-profound, intellectual-sounding 'bulls***' are less intelligent, less reflective, and more likely to be believe in conspiracy theories, the paranormal and alternative medicine.
PhD candidate Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, published a study entitled 'On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bulls***'.
It mentions the word 'bulls***' over 200 times.
They tested hundreds of people to find the link between being impressed by 'bulls***' quotes and low intelligence.
Examples of 'bulls***' were given, as it is a hard term to define.
Essentially, it means grand-sounding statements which mean nothing - many people post such things on Instagram.
An example was: "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty."
The paper says: "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."
"Bulls***, in contrast to mere nonsense, is something that implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth."
Pennycook used a website that would randomly generate these pseudo-profound sentences from a string of words.
This website is active, and serves up wise-sounding aphorisms like "This life is nothing short of an unveiling quantum leap of mythic rejuvenation" and "We are at a crossroads of transformation and desire" at the click of a button.
Almost 300 test subjects were asked to rate the profundity of these sentences on a scale of one to five.
They were asked to differentiate between philosophy quotes, "bulls***", and mundane sentences.
Most recognised the mundane as mundane, but rated the made-up quotes on similar levels of profoundity to tweets posted by Deepak Chopra, a writer.
http://www.telegraph.co.u(...)ow-intelligence.html