Measuring individual differences in generic beliefs in conspiracy theories across cultures: Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire

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Measuring individual differences in generic beliefs in conspiracy theories across cultures: Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire.

Conspiracy theories are ubiquitous when it comes to explaining political events and societal phenomena. Individuals differ not only in the degree to which they believe in specific conspiracy theories, but also in their general susceptibility to explanations based on such theories, that is, their conspiracy mentality. We present the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, an instrument designed to efficiently assess differences in the generic tendency to engage in conspiracist ideation within and across cultures. The Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire is available in English, German, and Turkish. In four studies, we examined the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire's factorial structure, reliability, measurement equivalence across cultures, and its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Analyses based on a cross-cultural sample supported the conceptualization of conspiracy mentality as a one-dimensional construct across the three language versions of the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire that is stable across time. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated cross-cultural measurement equivalence of the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire items. The instrument could therefore be used to examine differences in conspiracy mentality between European, North American, and Middle Eastern cultures. In Studies Two through Four, total we report analyses of three datasets demonstrating the validity of the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire in student and working population samples in the UK and Germany. First, attesting to its convergent validity, the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire was highly correlated with another measure of generic conspiracy belief. Second, the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire showed patterns of meaningful associations with personality measures (e.g., Big Five dimensions, schizotypy), other generalized political attitudes (e.g., social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism), and further individual differences (e.g., paranormal belief, lack of socio-political control). Finally, the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire predicted beliefs in specific conspiracy theories over and above other individual difference measures.

"Other centuries have only dabbled in conspiracy like amateurs. It is our century which has established conspiracy as a system of thought and a method of action." INTRODUCTION Belief in conspiracy theories continues to thrive in the twenty-first century. In Western cultures, recent popular conspiracy theories have revolved - among other themes - around the perpetrators (and possible knowing bystanders) of the Nine Eleven attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the deaths of Princess Diana, and Osama bin Laden, and the scientific evidence for climate change. These new conspiracy theories take their place next to "classics" such as alleged plots concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the cover-up of alien contact, or the origins of diseases such as HIV. There is increasing evidence that there are stable individual differences in people's tendency to believe in such conspiracy theories; if a person believes in one conspiracy theory, he or she will also be more likely to believe in other conspiracy theories. In fact, this tendency even extends to beliefs in mutually contradictory conspiracy theories, and to beliefs in fully fictitious conspiracy theories. Thus, those who believe that Princess Diana faked her own death are also more likely to believe that she was murdered; those who believe in "real-world conspiracy theories" (i.e., that John F. Kennedy fell victim to an organized conspiracy) are more likely to believe that there was a conspiracy behind the success of the Red Bull energy drink - a conspiracy theory that was purposely developed for a social psychology study.

This has led some researchers to propose that the endorsement of specific conspiracy theories depends to a large extent on individual differences in the general tendency to adopt such beliefs, that is, a general conspiracy mentality. This term was originally phrased by Moscovici who understood the notion of conspiracy as implying "that members of a confession, party, or ethnicity are united by an indissoluble secret bond. The object of such an alliance is to foment upheaval in society, pervert societal values, aggravate crises, promote defeat, and so on." As such, a conspiracy mentality then describes the general propensity to subscribe to theories blaming a conspiracy of ill-intending individuals or groups for important societal phenomena or, in more abstract terms, the tendency to subscribe to "general conspiracist beliefs." Usually, such theories contradict common explanations and allege that these events are caused by secret plots by groups of powerful individuals. Individual differences in conspiracy mentality have important consequences as they predict prejudice against powerful societal groups. Consequences of this may either be intentions to engage in political action designed to undermine the perceived conspiracy or - if the conspiracy is perceived to be overpowering - political disengagement. Further, conspiracy beliefs are powerful predictors of critical health behaviors such as adherence to medication regimens and vaccination uptake. There have been a number of initial efforts to measure individual differences in conspiracy mentality, sometimes called "conspiracist ideation," the most prominent of which is Swami and colleagues' Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory. This consists of fifteen items measuring beliefs in specific conspiracy theories, for example, "A powerful and secretive group, known as the New World Order, are planning to eventually rule the world through an autonomous world government, which would replace sovereign governments," and has been used in the United Kingdom and continental Europe as well as East Asia. The internal reliability of this scale has consistently been very good and it relates in meaningful ways to other individual difference variables such as support for democratic principles, political cynicism, negative attitudes to authority, and low agreeableness. However, scales measuring beliefs in specific conspiracy theories are closely bound to specific temporal and geographical contexts. In response to these limitations, it has been suggested that there is a need to assess the general tendency to believe in conspiracies in a way that is not dependent on the cultural familiarity of selected theories and also independent of knowledge about specific conspiracy theories which may vary between cultures. For example, it is unlikely that the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory item concerning the New World Order is equally familiar in all countries around the world. Hitherto, there have been two attempts to address this challenge, however, neither explicitly address the cross-cultural validity of the measurement instruments. First, Brotherton et al. have developed a fifteen-item Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale on the basis of an exploratory factor analysis of seventy-five items. They were able to differentiate between five major components of generic conspiracy beliefs: governmental conspiracies, extraterrestrial conspiracies, informational control conspiracies, personal well-being conspiracies, and malevolent global conspiracies. These dimensions are also reflected in the final scale. Second, Imhoff and Bruder developed a twelve-item Conspiracy Mentality Scale. The items of this instrument not only avoid mentioning any specific alleged conspiracy, but also do not name any specific groups that may be responsible for a conspiracy, example item: "Most people do not recognize to what extent our life is determined by conspiracies that are concocted in secret." Both the authors of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale and the Conspiracy Mentality Scale provide initial evidence for the convergent and discriminant validity of their instruments.

However, neither scale has been validated in non-Western cultures and so far neither scale has been adopted by researchers other than the original authors. We believe that these activities attest to the scientific relevance of developing valid, reliable, and efficient instruments to measure generic conspiracy beliefs. In this context, we will propose the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, a short five-item measure of generic conspiracy beliefs that we administered in a large seven thousand seven hundred sixty-six international study spanning North American, United States, Western European, United Kingdom and Ireland; Germany, and Middle Eastern, Turkey, cultures. The cross-cultural dimension has so far been largely absent from research on conspiracy theories. Developing that dimension would be highly desirable because it is likely that individual characteristics and cultural factors interact when it comes to the belief in specific conspiracy theories, and its consequences on attitudes and behaviors. In particular, a number of studies have shown that subcultures within national groups are differentially prone to belief in conspiracy theories. For example, African American and Latino communities in the United States are particularly likely to endorse conspiracy theories claiming that HIV was spread to extinguish specific ethnic groups. Connecting these findings with research looking at individual differences in the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories is a promising endeavor - even more so when extending the perspective to different cultures around the globe. At the global level, conspiracy theories have been identified as a driving factor in the discourses of conflict in the Middle East. Again, identifying how such broader societal phenomena relate to, and interact with, individual characteristics constitutes a worthwhile future research agenda. Our scale is designed to facilitate such future efforts.

DISCUSSION The main purpose of our analyses was to examine the factorial structure and internal consistency, the measurement equivalence across cultures, and the validity of the five-item CMQ - a psychometric instrument designed to assess individual differences in conspiracy mentality. Regarding the factorial structure of the CMQ, our data were consistent with the assumption that conspiracy mentality - at its core - constitutes a one-dimensional construct. In each of the English, German, and Turkish language versions, exploratory factor analyses strongly suggested a one-factor solution with satisfactory loadings of all individual items; accordingly, internal consistency of the scale was adequate in all studies. This is consistent with the fact that longer instruments are able to identify subscales of generic conspiracy beliefs. Brotherton et al. Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale does just that by differentiating between conspiracy theories related to government malfeasance, extraterrestrial coverup, control of information, etc. In order to successfully identify subscales, the instrument must contain a sufficient number of items with relatively specific information about possible perpetrators and topics of conspiracies without explicitly referring to any existing conspiracy theory. This approach comes with dangers. First, any specification of content-related aspects such as the topic of the conspiracy (e.g., "New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed"; Brotherton et al.) renders cross-cultural comparisons more difficult. For example, whereas in some countries the transition from old to new technologies may simply be a matter of market forces, in other countries new technologies may actually be suppressed for political or economic ends. Although an item such as the one by Brotherton et al. above may be a good indicator of conspiracy mentality in the former type of country (e.g., democracies), answers to this item may reflect appropriate skepticism and low gullibility rather than conspiracy mentality in the latter type of country (e.g., autocracies). Second, any specification of content-related aspects makes a scale more susceptible to the influence of current political events (e.g., the Fukushima

Daiichi disaster in twenty eleven may have temporarily or lastingly changed attitudes toward some new technologies in certain countries but not others). Thus, although there is doubtlessly substantial benefit in a fine-grained assessment of conspiracy beliefs, we suggest that there are also benefits in a short generic measure focusing on the central construct of conspiracy mentality. The two approaches should therefore be considered as complementary. As Brotherton et al. have themselves argued, for most purposes, it will be sufficient to establish an overall score measuring the tendency to engage in conspiracist ideation. The CMQ provides a highly economical instrument to do just that, for which measurement equivalence has been established across markedly different cultures. Brotherton et al. Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale, instead, may be better suited for exploring domain-specific differences in conspiracy beliefs. However, its measurement and SE have yet to be established before it can be used in non-English-speaking countries. Our analyses concerning the measurement equivalence of the CMQ across its three language versions provided initial support for the idea that it is possible to assess conspiracy mentality across different cultures. In fact, constraining item loadings to be equal across language versions did not substantially reduce model fit. Thus, items "function" equally well in English-, German-, and Turkish-speaking contexts despite some questions as to whether the construct of conspiracy mentality is as well captured by a one-dimensional scale in a Turkish context than in the other two contexts. This finding illustrates the potential complementarity of our measure with other, more detailed and culture-dependent measures of conspiracy beliefs. Our scale helped to identify a need to examine the structure of conspiracy beliefs in the Middle East using more extensive measures such as the one developed by Brotherton et al. Study one A also provided support for the utility of the CMQ in describing mean differences in conspiracy beliefs. At a cross-cultural level, Turkish participants were more prone to believe in conspiracy theories than participants from Western countries (Germany, UK/Ireland, US), who did not systematically differ in their conspiracy mentality. This is consistent with suggestions that conspiracy beliefs are particularly rife in the Middle East. Within cultures, we observed that women in the US, but not in the other countries, scored higher on conspiracy mentality than did men. This is a powerful reminder that even research focusing on sex differences does well in examining men and women in more than one culture before claiming to have uncovered "essential" (rather than culture-specific) differences between the sexes. Our studies provide ample evidence for the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the CMQ. Study four showed that it is closely associated with the Conspiracy Mentality Scale, a measure that has been shown to meaningfully predict intergroup and political attitudes. Further evidence for the convergent validity of the scale comes from meaningful predicted correlations with other generalized political attitudes, personality measures, and further individual differences measures. Beyond these associations, there exist a plethora of potentially meaningful and important relationships to other constructs. For example, recent articles discussed the influence of uncertainty and perceptions of morality as well as the influence of anxiety-inducing situations on conspiracist ideation. One may also want to explore whether people with strong imaginative abilities (i.e., high fantasy proneness or absorption) or those who are more susceptible to outside influence (e.g., those high in hypnotic suggestibility) are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, or whether and in what way personality variables in general interact with conspiracy mentality over time. However, these questions will have to be addressed in future research. For the initial evaluation of the CMQ, we purposely focused on those constructs that have been mentioned in the literature on conspiracy beliefs and ascertained that the CMQ relates to these constructs in predictable ways. The relationship between perceptions of control and conspiracy beliefs warrants some further discussion. Conspiracy beliefs have long been linked to low levels of societal power and control. For example, those threatened by unemployment as well as ethnic minorities are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Consistent with these findings, we also observed a negative association between conspiracy mentality and perceived socio-political control as well as a positive association between conspiracy mentality and anomia. However, in our data there was no relationship between conspiracy mentality and lack of personal or interpersonal control despite recent evidence that inducing perceptions of low personal control also increases the attribution of ambiguous events to conspiracies. We argue that the difference lies in the functionality of conspiracy beliefs that differs between our correlational design and experimental designs such as Whitson and Galinsky's due to differences in attribution. For experimentally induced control deprivation, beliefs in conspiracies constitute an opportunity to engage in compensatory action: Seeing the plot behind the curtains helps to regain a sense of control. We argue that the situation is different for self-reported low levels of personal control that are predominantly internally attributed (as measured, e.g., by the item "It's pointless to keep working on something that's too difficult for me"). Here, adopting a belief about how others secretly try to gain control over the world would not constitute a functional way of regaining a sense of control, precisely because this lack of control is internally attributed. If own failures were externally attributed (e.g., if there was an item stating "Others confront me with much harder tasks than my competitors"), endorsing conspiracy beliefs may be functional in regaining feelings of control ("I am not incompetent, rather, ill-intending individuals are against me"). The same logic applies to the Spheres of Control subscale of interpersonal control that also targets internally attributed lack of control (e.g., "I'm not good at guiding the course of a conversation with several others"). However, this is markedly different for the subscale tapping into socio-political control which explicitly introduces attributions to external causes (e.g., "Bad economic conditions are caused by world events that are beyond our control"). Thus, it should be expected that conspiracy mentality as a stable generalized political attitude is related to levels of socio-political control but not to momentary fluctuations in perceived personal or interpersonal control. Indeed this is what we observed. Although conspiracy mentality relates to a large number of individual difference measures in meaningful ways, none of these correlations reaches a level that casts doubt on its viability as an independent construct. In particular, whereas the CMQ's correlation with the Conspiracy Mentality Scale was zero point eight two, all other correlations were smaller than zero point five four (most of them substantially so). Critically, the CMQ fared very well - and much better than any other of the individual difference measures - in predicting beliefs in specific conspiracy theories even when controlling for a large number of alternative predictors. Only a minority of specific conspiracy theories could not be predicted well. Again, this may hint at the role of situational factors in determining the degree to which people (at the time of data collection) believed in these specific theories. This underlines the need to integrate research on situational factors determining endorsement of specific conspiracy beliefs with stable individual differences in conspiracy mentality. We argue that our findings build a convincing case for the suitability and utility of the CMQ as a measure of conspiracy beliefs. However, we recognize that the present studies have their limitations. First, our samples were not representative of the general population of the different countries, and any generalization should therefore proceed with caution. However, one should note that we made an effort to recruit diverse participant samples to avoid relying on highly specific subgroups of the population. In particular, samples differed in terms of participants' professions (e.g., students in Studies two and four and employees in Study three) as well as in cultural background (Western Europe, Middle East, and North America). Further, Study one a is - with over seven thousand five hundred participants - one of the largest available data collections on a broad range of items assessing both generic and specific beliefs in conspiracy theories in a cross-cultural context. Similarity in recruitment methods across cultural groups resulted in comparable group compositions in terms of key socio-demographic characteristics, thus allowing for at least tentative between-country comparisons concerning the absolute level of conspiracy mentality. We are aware that the difference in sample size across the four studies (ranging from N equals seven hundred sixty-six to N equals seven thousand seven hundred sixty-six) may appear inconsistent. However, on close inspection the results reveal high levels of consistency of findings across the different studies. For example: (one) despite the differences in sample size, age, and professions between Studies two and three, the CMQ scores are highly similar in terms of means and standard deviations. Further, (two) the correlation between the Paranoid Ideation Scale and the CMQ are of similar strength across the two studies (R equals zero point four five and zero point five zero). (three) The findings concerning the CMQ's predictive validity are highly consistent throughout all four studies. The average correlation of the CMQ with all specific conspiracy theory items always ranged between zero point five zero and zero point five eight. More importantly - as stated above - the CMQ consistently turned out to be the strongest predictor for the belief in specific conspiracy theories across all studies, despite controlling for a broad range of other potential predictors. Only a minority of specific conspiracy theories could not be predicted well. Again, this may hint at the role of situational factors in determining the degree to which people (at the time of data collection) believed in these specific theories. This underlines the need to integrate research on situational factors determining endorsement of specific conspiracy beliefs with stable individual differences in conspiracy mentality. We argue that our findings build a convincing case for the suitability and utility of the CMQ as a measure of conspiracy beliefs. However, we recognize that the present studies have their limitations. Second, we are aware of the fact that our scale is not completely free from content-related aspects. For example, the item "I think government agencies closely monitor all citizens" does provide more specific information than the item "I think that events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities." This difference may be responsible for the fact that the former item showed a comparatively low factor loading in the Turkish language version. Although we acknowledge that this potential problem must be carefully monitored when extending the use of the scale to further, possibly non-democratic, countries, the level of content provided still allowed for measurement equivalence across the language versions. Lastly, an instrument with items not mentioning any actors or possible topics of conspiracies runs the danger of not adequately capturing the construct. Thus, in our view, the distinction between scales measuring generic and specific conspiracy beliefs is not as clear cut as one may initially suspect. In particular, "generic" scales will usually have to provide some level of specific content to render the assessment of a conspiracy mentality meaningful. Our scale, we suggest, qualifies as a comparatively generic measure able to efficiently assess the general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories in a cross-cultural context.

CODA There is much reason to think that there is no return to what Moscovici describes as the amateur stage of conspiracy beliefs. To the contrary, an increasingly fast-paced political process characterized by frantic political and economic competition is bound to generate a number of competing theories proclaiming to explain certain societal phenomena and events. The internet is a powerful communication tool that even allows theories to proliferate that in former times may not have passed the filter of mainstream media; and conspiracy theories seem ubiquitous in many cultural contexts. Whether presidential candidates are blamed for covering their real birth place or whether outside powers are blamed for civil unrest in autocratic countries like Syria - conspiracy beliefs permeate political and societal processes. Being able to reliably assess the general tendency to endorse such theories with the CMQ

should help to guide the next steps in the exciting endeavor to better understand the psychological role o

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Finding meaning in the clouds: Illusory pattern perception predicts receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit Alexander C. Walker, Martin Harry Turpint, Jennifer A. Stolzt, Jonathan A. Fugelsangt, Derek J. Koehlert. Abstract Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. We find support for this prediction across three experiments and four distinct measures of pattern perception. We further demonstrate that this observed relation is restricted to illusory pattern perception, with participants displaying greater endorsement of non-illusory patterns being no more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. Additionally, this relation is not a product of a general proclivity to rate all statements as profound and is not accounted for by individual differences in analytic thinking. Overall, we demonstrate that individuals with a tendency to go beyond the available data such that they uncritically endorse patterns where no patterns exist are also more likely to create and endorse false-meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. These findings are discussed in the context of a proposed framework that views individuals' receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit as, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive process: that of pattern perception. Keywords: pseudo-profound bullshit, bullshit receptivity, illusory pattern perception, irrational belief One Introduction "Bullshit is everywhere." - George Carlin This statement may be truer today than ever before, as technological advances have allowed for information to spread faster and farther than ever before. Included in this expansion of information is likely an increase in peoples' exposure to bullshit. While many people may believe that they can reliably detect and resist bullshit, empirical findings suggest otherwise. This research was supported by grants from The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Copyright: twenty nineteen. The authors license this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution three point zero License.

a24walke@uwaterloo.ca. Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo. icher and Schindler; Sterling, Jost and Pennycook. For example, an initial investigation of people's receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit by Pennycook and colleagues demonstrated how people frequently rate these superficially impressive yet vacuous statements as profound. Furthermore, studies have reported initial evidence for how receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit relates to real-world beliefs, such as beliefs about political ideologies and candidates, conspiracy and supernatural beliefs, and beliefs about the accuracy of "fake news". Despite bullshit representing a real, prevalent, and consequential phenomenon, little research has been conducted on the topic. The current article furthers the investigation of pseudo-profound bullshit in two ways: First, we propose that peoples' susceptibility to pseudo-profound bullshit arises in part as an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive behaviour, that of pattern perception; second, congruent with this proposal, we investigate whether individuals susceptible to endorsing illusory patterns are more receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. One point one Pseudo-profound bullshit Initial investigations of bullshit, specifically of the pseudoprofound variety, have utilized Frankfurt's conception of bullshit as an absence of concern for the truth. That is, according to Frankfurt, bullshit is not about falsity but rather fakery; bullshit may be true, false, or meaningless, what makes a claim bullshit is an implied yet artificial attention to the truth.

Consistent with this description of bullshit, Pennycook and colleagues generated a list of superficially impressive statements that implied yet did not contain either truth or meaning by having a computer program randomly arrange a set of profound-sounding words in a way that maintained proper syntactic structure. In addition to demonstrating peoples' receptiveness to meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit statements, Pennycook and colleagues revealed how various individual differences were associated with bullshit receptivity. Specifically, it was found that those more receptive to bullshit were less analytic thinkers (e.g., scored lower on the Cognitive Reflection Test), scored lower in measures of cognitive ability (e.g., the Wordsum test and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices), and were more likely to hold religious, conspiratorial, and paranormal beliefs. Two mechanisms were proposed to explain participants' endorsement of pseudoprofound bullshit. First, some participants were shown to possess a general tendency to afford any and all statements some level of profundity (e.g., mundane statements such as "Some things have very distinct smells"). The results of Pennycook and colleagues suggest that this gullible tendency towards ascribing profoundness to even the most mundane of statements is one component of bullshit receptivity. Second, individual differences in analytic thinking (as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test and a "Heuristics and Biases" battery) were found to be associated with bullshit receptivity. Specifically, those with a propensity for analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking were found to be less receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. Thus, another explanation put forth by Pennycook and colleagues is that individuals differ with regards to their ability to detect bullshit, with more analytic thinkers being more likely to detect and critically reflect on the presented pseudo-profound bullshit statements leading to lower ratings of profundity. The primary goal of this paper is to propose a third compatible mechanism to explain individual differences in receptivity to pseudoprofound bullshit: the illusory perception of patterns. One point two Illusory pattern perception The ability to perceive patterns and form meaningful connections between stimuli in our environment is clearly evolutionarily advantageous. For example, Mattson claims that superior pattern processing capabilities are essential for a variety of higher cognitive functions (e.g., imagination and invention) and likewise, credits these capabilities as fundamental to the technological progress humans have enjoyed. Relatedly, he argues that evolved superior pattern processing abilities are a primary reason why human cognition greatly exceeds the capabilities of lower species. Due to the adaptive nature of pattern perception, it has been claimed that we are the descendants of those best able to detect patterns. Nevertheless, our proclivity for detecting patterns comes with a cost, as we often find it difficult to distinguish between real and illusory patterns. Therefore, the same adaptive processes that allow us to perceive patterns and identify meaningful connections between stimuli in our environment also leads us to sometimes perceive illusory patterns and consequently endorse false beliefs about reality. However, when comparing the consequences of failing to detect a real and informative pattern with those of endorsing an illusory pattern, one of these errors may frequently loom larger than the other. For example, failing to connect a rustling in the grass with the presence of a dangerous predator has more dire consequences than mistakenly attributing movement in the grass to a predator and misguidedly escaping from a gust of wind. Using an evolutionary model, Biologist Foster and Kokko demonstrated how natural selection can favour strategies that involve the frequent endorsement of illusory patterns in order to ensure successful detection of meaningful patterns that offer large reproductive and survival benefits. Additionally, beliefs based on illusory patterns can even be advantageous if they disrupt aversive feelings, such as overwhelming thoughts of lacking control in an unpredictable world.

This asymmetry of consequences between missing a real pattern and endorsing an illusory one is one reason humans are said to have evolved a "believing-brain" with a proclivity for pattern perception and a susceptibility to being fooled by illusory patterns. Thus, not unlike the adaptive heuristics that guide decision-making, yet predictably lead to certain biases, pattern perception may represent an adaptive function at the heart of both rational and irrational beliefs about how stimuli are connected in the environments that we inhabit. Illusory pattern perception includes the perception of connections between unrelated stimuli as well as the perception of patterns within random stimuli. One reason for the occurrence of illusory pattern perception is the fact that individuals often have difficulty accepting that ordered events can emerge from random processes. For example, when asked to produce random sequences, people often produce far more variation (and therefore fewer "runs") than would be created by a truly random process. What follows, is that when people encounter random sequences that coincidentally maintain some order (e.g., symmetry in a series of coin tosses) they may ascribe a meaningful nonrandom process as its source. People's tendency to engage in illusory pattern perception has been shown to be associated with various irrational beliefs. For example, it has been found that individuals who perceive more illusory patterns are also more likely to endorse conspiracy and supernatural beliefs. Related to this association between illusory pattern perception and irrational belief is the finding that lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. It has been demonstrated that those induced to feel a lack of control perceive more illusory patterns and engage in more conspiratorial and superstitious thinking. On the basis of this evidence they argue that feeling a lack of control in one's environment is so aversive that individuals will often endorse illusory patterns and irrational beliefs in order to diminish feelings of lacking control and return to the more pleasant view that one's environment is predictable. Consistent with this argument is additional evidence demonstrating that lacking control increases conspiracy and supernatural beliefs. Therefore, irrational beliefs may not only arise as the result of a believing-brain with a proclivity towards pattern perception, but also as a compensatory strategy that seeks to endorse patterns (illusory or not) in order to alleviate aversive states, such as feeling a lack of control in an unpredictable environment. One point three. The current study The current study investigates how individual differences in pattern perception relate to differences in pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity. While previous studies have observed a positive relation between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs (e.g., conspiracy and supernatural beliefs) no study has examined the relation between pattern perception and bullshit receptivity. Bullshit is distinct from other irrational beliefs on two dimensions. First, bullshit as conceived of by Frankfurt is disinterested in the specific truth or untruth of a given claim. That is, the primary goal of a bullshitter is to be persuasive, without concern for the validity of their claims. In contrast, irrational beliefs involve individuals endorsing beliefs that are specifically concerned with making truth claims. For example, the belief that the United States government is covering up its own involvement in the two thousand one Islamic terrorist attacks against the World Trade Centre. In this case, those with a belief in this conspiracy are insisting that there is a truth to be discovered that is merely being covered up by a government's deception. This point leads into a second distinguishing feature of bullshit: specificity. Continuing with the example of the Nine Eleven attacks, endorsing this belief comes along with endorsing a specific set of rules for how the world and governments operate. Bullshit receptivity, however, requires only the vague perception that there is something meaningful being communicated by the bullshitter. Bullshit receptivity could be an early contributor to the eventual adoption of an irrational belief, but there is no reason a priori to assume that they are identical. Despite being distinguished from other irrational beliefs, we expect that bullshit receptivity will relate to illusory pattern perception in a familiar way. Specifically, we hypothesize that individuals susceptible to endorsing illusory patterns will be more receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. This hypothesis is consistent with our view of receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit as arising in part as an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive process: the uncritical perception of patterns in our environment. Therefore, we believe that individuals with a greater tendency to go beyond the available data and uncritically endorse patterns where no patterns exist will also be more likely to create and endorse false-meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. Importantly, we expect this relation to remain after controlling for individual differences in analytic thinking. Controlling for analytic thinking is important as individual differences in analytic thinking have been shown to relate to a host of irrational beliefs, including conspiracy and supernatural thinking. Therefore, it is possible that previous positive associations observed between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs are simply a result of those with an intuitive (as opposed to analytic) thinking style being more likely to endorse illusory patterns as well as irrational beliefs. Lastly, we expect illusory pattern perception to share an association with bullshit sensitivity, a measure of participants' ability to distinguish between legitimately meaningful motivational quotations and pseudoprofound bullshit statements. That is, we believe that individual differences in illusory pattern perception will relate specifically to the endorsement of meaningless statements as profound as opposed to relating to an increase in profundity ratings in general. In Experiments One and Two we build on two experiments from Van Prooijen and colleagues, which examined the relation between participants' endorsements of illusory patterns and their level of conspiracy and supernatural belief. Importantly, we modified these experiments in order to assess the research questions at hand by replacing items assessing participants' conspiracy and supernatural beliefs with a profundity judgment task featuring both pseudo-profound bullshit statements and motivational quotations. Furthermore, we added in a measure of analytic thinking in order to assess and control for individual differences in thinking style. In Experiment Three we improve upon these first two experiments by utilizing two new measures of pattern perception which more concretely and objectively feature both real and illusory patterns. These measures of pattern perception allow us to more convincingly distinguish between how individual differences in illusory, as opposed to non-illusory, pattern perception relate to differences in bullshit receptivity and bullshit sensitivity. Taken together, the current study utilizes four distinct measures of pattern perception to conduct an initial investigation of how individual differences in the endorsement of both illusory and non-illusory (Experiments Two and Three) patterns predicts individuals' receptivity to pseudoprofound bullshit.

Five General discussion Across three experiments and four distinct measures of pattern perception, our findings provide support for our hypothesis that individuals susceptible to endorsing illusory patterns would be more receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. Notably, this association was observed for both conceptual and perceptual pattern perception tasks, suggesting that pattern perception may be a useful construct for connecting across conceptual and perceptual illusions. Additionally, this finding was not merely a consequence of illusory pattern perception being related to a general tendency to rate statements as profound as bullshit sensitivity was found to generally be positively associated with illusory pattern perception. That is, participants who endorsed more illusory patterns tended to judge pseudo-profound bullshit statements as equally (or more) profound than meaningful motivational quotations. Although it should be noted that individual differences in illusory pattern perception may also help explain why some individuals seemingly afford some level of profundity to any and all statements (including those that are pseudo-profound). This is evidenced by our finding that profundity ratings for even "truly profound" motivational quotes also share a positive relation with illusory pattern perception (albeit weaker than pseudo-profound bullshit). Therefore, illusory pattern perception may not represent a mechanism entirely distinct from one put forth by Pennycook and colleagues suggesting that a gullible tendency towards ascribing profoundness to even the most mundane of statements is one component of bullshit receptivity. Previous research has found that individuals less likely to engage in analytic thinking are more receptive to pseudoprofound bullshit. We replicate these findings in the current study consistently observing a negative relation between bullshit receptivity and CRT performance. One possibility is that the relation between bullshit receptivity and illusory pattern perception arises simply as a result of intuitive thinkers being more prone to both bullshit receptivity and illusory pattern perception. However, the relation between bullshit receptivity and illusory pattern perception was largely unaffected by the inclusion of CRT performance as a covariate, suggesting that illusory pattern perception may represent a distinct mechanism for explaining individual differences in bullshit receptivity. Nevertheless, the results of the current study do suggest a modest negative relation between CRT performance and illusory pattern perception, such that individuals with a greater tendency to engage in analytical thinking appear less likely to endorse illusory patterns. This finding suggests that the tendency to engage analytic thinking as well as the tendency to perceive illusory patterns may interact in predicting who adopts irrational beliefs. That is, being less likely to engage analytic thinking may make individuals more likely to perceive patterns in random noise while simultaneously leaving them less able to correct for this intuitive perception. This speculation could have interesting implications for research on irrational beliefs that future studies should explore. Lastly, the results of Experiments Two and Three demonstrate that increases in non-illusory pattern perception are not predictive of increases in bullshit receptivity. In fact, results obtained from two of our three measures of non-illusory pattern perception suggest that participants who perceived more non-illusory patterns were less receptive to bullshit. Therefore, bullshit receptivity does not appear to be positively associated with a proclivity for endorsing patterns in general. Rather, it is specifically a proclivity for endorsing illusory patterns that was shown to share a positive association with bullshit receptivity. Accounts of various irrational beliefs, including conspiracy, supernatural, and superstitious beliefs, have explained these beliefs in part as arising due to peoples' natural tendency to uncritically perceive patterns. Congruent with these accounts are findings showing that a tendency to endorse illusory patterns is positively associated with various irrational beliefs. In the current article, we propose a similar account in attempt to elucidate why people are frequently receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit. Specifically, we propose that bullshit receptivity arises in part as an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise adaptive pattern perception process. Such a perspective is important as, compared to initial accounts of bullshit receptivity which focus on receptivity to bullshit as arising from errors in reasoning (e.g., failing to engage in reflective thinking when encountering bullshit), this account emphasizes distinct ways to potentially reduce peoples' susceptibility to bullshit. For example, it has been documented that aversive feelings, such as feelings related to a lack of control, increase peoples' endorsement of illusory patterns. Thus, to the extent that greater illusory pattern perception leads to the creation of meaning where no meaning exists, manipulations that allow people to regain a sense of control should also reduce their susceptibility to bullshit. Congruent with this claim, enhancing people's sense of control has been demonstrated to lower conspiracy beliefs. Finally, related to the concepts examined here (i.e., pattern perception, engagement of analytic thinking, and bullshit receptivity) is the construct of liberal acceptance. Liberal acceptance, or the tendency to collect little evidence and have lower decision-thresholds for making strong judgments, has been discussed as a risk factor for the emergence of various delusions and irrational beliefs, specifically for those suffering from psychosis. For example, Moritz and colleagues, examining a liberal acceptance account of psychosis, found that patients suffering from schizophrenia were more likely to strongly endorse a false memory on a recognition memory test compared to healthy controls, specifically for weakly or moderately related distractors (as opposed to strongly related distractors for which no differences between patients and controls were observed). One might expect that liberal acceptance would be associated with greater illusory pattern perception, lower levels of analytic thinking, and a tendency to endorse pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. The relation between illusory pattern perception and bullshit receptivity (perhaps compounded by low levels of analytic thinking) could be explained by this concept of liberal acceptance. That is, a person with low decision-thresholds for judging the relevance of infrequent or unrelated events may also be more likely to endorse illusory patterns as well as find meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. Five point one. Future directions and limitations One limitation of the current study was that, across all three experiments, our pattern perception tasks preceded our profundity judgment task, resulting in potential order effects. However, while one can imagine how profundity judgments may be influenced by first having participants complete a pattern perception task, it is not clear how the predictive validity of our individual difference measures would be affected. Furthermore, a clear limitation of the current study is its strictly correlational nature which prevents support of any causal claims. Thus, while increases in illusory pattern perception may lead to greater bullshit receptivity, it is also possible that the endorsement of pseudo-profound bullshit leads to greater illusory pattern perception or that both of these variables are associated with some unmeasured third variable (e.g., liberal acceptance). Nevertheless, we believe that the more parsimonious model is one suggesting a low-level perceptual process contributing to a higher level conceptual process as opposed to a model suggesting the reverse (i.e., bullshit receptivity influencing pattern perception). This may give some weight to our suggested account however, ideally, a future study would address this limitation by directly manipulating illusory pattern perception in order to investigate the potential causal link between illusory pattern perception and bullshit receptivity. However, successfully manipulating individuals' propensities towards illusory pattern perception in a way that remains influential during individuals' subsequent profundity ratings of pseudo-profound bullshit statements may prove difficult. One potential way to accomplish this goal is through a loss of control manipulation, such that aversive feelings of lacking control have been shown to lead to increases in illusory pattern perception and conspiratorial and superstitious beliefs. Therefore, future research could investigate whether those randomly assigned a task that induces a lack of control more readily endorse pseudo-profound bullshit as profound. Five point two. Conclusion Like other irrational beliefs, bullshit is a real, prevalent, and consequential phenomenon. Due to this prevalence and potential for harm, the ability to recognize and avoid bullshit is an essential skill to have in today's world. Unfortunately, initial investigations of peoples' susceptibilities to pseudoprofound bullshit paint a grim picture, with people frequently endorsing profundity in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. In the current study we propose that, like many other irrational beliefs, people's susceptibilities to bullshit results from an overall adaptive tendency to perceive patterns in the world. We demonstrate that individuals with a proclivity towards endorsing illusory patterns are more likely to rate meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. In conclusion, the tendency to go beyond the available data and infuse the world with illusory patterns is positively associated with the tendency to create and endorse meaning in superficially impressive, yet ultimately meaningless, pseudoprofound statements.