“If someone is a good bulls----er, they are likely quite smart,” says Martin Turpin, a graduate student at the Reasoning and Decision Making Lab at the Unversity of Waterloo and co-lead on the study recently published in the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology.
Turpin and his colleagues found that people who are better at producing believable explanations for concepts, even when those explanations aren’t based on fact, typically score better on intelligence tests than those who struggle to “bulls---,” as the study puts it.
“However, it is not the case that those who are not good bulls----ers are less intelligent,” Turpin says.
Turpin says just like having a sense of humor is linked to intelligence, many smart people are not funny. “The same could be said of bulls----ing,” he says.
For the study, researchers described a “bullsh---er” as someone who “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false...He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
To conduct the study, researchers used 1,017 participants across two separate studies that examined the subjects’ willingness to BS, how good they were at it and their overall cognitive ability.
To measure subjects’ ability to BS, each person was asked about 10 “concepts” with names like “Sexual Selection Theory” and “General Relativity” — some were real concepts and some were made up. Participants rated their knowledge of each using a five-point scale ranging from “never heard of it” to “know it well, understand the concept.” TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...
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