Do people with higher IQ rate pseudo-profound made-up statements as less profound than people with lower IQs?
- Nikola Erceg, Spencer Greenberg, and Beleń Cobeta
- Sep 24, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.
Yes. We have found a moderate negative correlation of r = -0.28 between IQ and profoundness ratings that participants gave to pseudo-profound made-up statements (sometimes referred to as "pseudo-profound bullshit" in the literature). To test this, we asked a sample of n = 672 people to read the following statements and tell us how profound (i.e., of deep meaning) they thought the statements were (spoiler: all the statements were made up using an AI designed to generate meaningless but grammatically acceptable combinations of words, therefore presumably they are not actually particularly profound):
“A formless void serves the mechanics of destiny.”
“Interdependence is an ingredient of unparalleled experiences.”
“Innocence itself interacts with unique acceptance.”
“Nature unfolds through the light of mortality.”
And here is the scatterplot of this negative relationship between profoundness rating and IQ:
What do the other studies say?
While there are no meta-analyses that examined this relationship, there are several studies whose findings point to the same direction as ours. For example, Pennycook et al. (2015) conducted two studies in which they correlated profoundness ratings of pseudo-profound bullshit statements and different cognitive abilities and consistently found moderately sized negative correlations. Some of the correlations they tested were between profoundness ratings and verbal intelligence (r = -0.37 in Study 1 and r = -0.30 in Study 2), cognitive reflection (r = -0.33) and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (r = -0.27).
Takeaways
Higher IQ people may be less susceptible to believing that B.S. is profound.
If you'd like to read the full report, of which this is a section, as one long PDF, you can download it here.
And if you'd like to understand where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie, try the cognitive assessment tool that we developed out of this research:
