Bullshit Receptivity: Why We Trust the Wrong Words

Host Leslie Poston discusses “bullshit receptivity,” a peer-reviewed construct describing susceptibility to impressive-sounding but meaningless language. She highlights Cornell cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell’s studies in which over 1,000 office workers rated AI-generated corporate jargon alongside real executive quotes; those most impressed scored lowest on analytic thinking and workplace decision-making, and were more likely to amplify jargon in a feedback loop that rewards BS-producing leaders. Poston connects this to earlier work by Gordon Pennycook (University of Waterloo) on pseudo-profound statements and cognitive defaults like initial acceptance and weak conflict monitoring, and to research linking BS receptivity with overclaiming, poor metacognition, fake news vulnerability (Pennycook and Rand), political slogans, and “scientific” BS. She notes Brandolini’s Law and emphasizes practicing analytic thinking, including restating claims in plain language, citing the University of Washington’s “Calling Bullshit” course and mentioning future coverage of pre-bunking.

00:00 Welcome and Setup
00:41 Cornell Corporate BS Study
02:49 Feedback Loop and Examples
04:56 Waterloo Origins of BS Scale
06:12 Why We Fall for It
07:55 Metacognition and Overclaiming
08:41 BS in News and Politics
10:28 Scientific and General BS
11:52 Training Your BS Detector
13:50 Practical Plain Language Test
14:47 Wrap Up and Teaser

The studies referenced:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886926000620
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/workers-who-love-synergizing-paradigms-might-be-bad-their-jobs
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/on-the-reception-and-detection-of-pseudoprofound-bullshit/0D3C87BCC238BCA38BC55E395BDC9999
https://sjdm.org/~baron/journal/20/200221/jdm200221.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202007/does-america-have-problem-bullshit-receptivity
https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/when-it-comes-to-the-academic-study-of-fake-news-bullshit-receptivity-is-a-thing/
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/6565
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13546783.2022.2066724

UPDATED with notes from the study author: (Note: I love it when an author adds nuance! We lead with curiosity here and we know 15 - 25 minute episodic summaries can potentially overly-condense a topic.)

Replying to the LinkedIn post about this, Dr. Littrell said:

"Re: "The findings are consistent across every domain: the strongest predictor of whether someone catches BS is whether they engage analytic thinking or "go with their gut"."

There's a bit more to it than that. People can fall for BS through either mode of thinking (more "reflective" and more "intuitive"):

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546783.2023.2189163
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.4154

More detailed discussion here, for anyone interested: https://bullshitology.substack.com/p/brown-pilled-why-we-fall-for-bullshit"

The Credibility Trap: Why Confidence Beats Correctness

Host Leslie Poston is back after a hiatus to move PsyberSpace to a new weekly Thursday schedule and explains why people often trust confident speakers over accurate ones, calling it the “credibility trap.” She outlines the confidence heuristic (certainty feels like evidence), why it works through verbal cues across all media, and how Dunning-Kruger dynamics and overclaiming research show that learning a little can increase false recognition and perceived expertise, a risk she notes may worsen with increased LLM use. She adds the authority heuristic, where credentials or platforms suppress scrutiny, and describes harms when confidently wrong figures are amplified, including in public health and policy. Research on “bullshit receptivity” and overconfidence in news judgment shows some people are especially vulnerable and unaware. She argues honest expertise sounds uncertain due to scientific qualifiers, which media incentives punish, and offers habits to resist: treat uncertainty as a knowledge signal, watch for broad undifferentiated certainty, separate authority from accuracy, and question one’s own discernment.

00:00 Welcome Back Update
00:21 The Credibility Trap
01:14 Confidence Heuristic Explained
03:05 Dunning Kruger And Overclaiming
06:10 Authority Signals Amplify Errors
09:49 Who Falls For It
12:11 Honesty Sounds Uncertain
15:38 How To Resist The Trap
18:18 Final Thoughts And Sign Off

How Propaganda Uses Your Values Against Your Brain: The Passport Revocation Example

Host Leslie Poston explains that no one is immune to propaganda, using her own initial approval of a proposal to revoke passports for unpaid child support as an example of how emotional framing can short-circuit deeper thinking. She argues effective propaganda relies on a grain of truth and an emotional trigger, using agenda-setting to shape what people think about and how, and distinguishes agitation propaganda (fast, gut-response) from integration propaganda (slow, worldview-shaping). She describes how moral conviction, motivated reasoning, and cognitive fluency can recruit analytical skill to defend prior conclusions, making simple frames feel both right and true. She warns that vague mechanisms attached to sympathetic victims can expand beyond intent, citing civil asset forfeiture and welfare fraud provisions, and offers habits: slow down on strong emotions, ask who’s missing from the frame, examine the mechanism and recourse, reject forced binaries, and note topics where scrutiny feels disloyal.

00:00 No One Is Immune
00:35 Passport Law Gut Reaction
02:15 Propaganda Uses Truth
03:08 Agitation vs Integration
04:55 Moral Conviction Trigger
06:26 Fluency Feels Like Truth
07:30 Framing Hides Mechanisms
08:42 Policy History Examples
09:33 Five Anti Propaganda Habits
12:10 Create the Thinking Gap
12:41 Closing and Subscribe

Moral Licensing: Why Doing Good Can Make Us Behave Worse

Host Leslie Poston explains the phenomenon of moral licensing: after people do something that affirms their identity as a good person, the brain registers progress toward a moral goal, reducing self-regulatory effort and making later unethical choices more likely, sometimes in unrelated domains. Using a fitness “daily budget” analogy, the episode describes evidence from environmental psychology (green purchases followed by increased lying and cheating), research on racial bias (publicly demonstrating egalitarian credentials followed by more biased choices), activism (low-cost visible actions reducing motivation for harder follow-through), and organizational contexts (leaders with strong ethical self-identities engaging in minor violations because identity buffers self-concept). Poston emphasizes the effect is unconscious, doesn’t require bad intentions, and calls for attention to the misleading feeling of having “done your part.”

00:00 Welcome and Topic Setup
00:40 What Is Moral Licensing
01:34 Virtue as a Budget
02:46 Green Choices Backfire
04:53 Licensing and Racial Bias
06:58 Activism and Workplace Ethics
08:28 Why the Brain Does It
10:44 Spotting It in Yourself
11:51 Wrap Up and Sign Off

The Cost of Losing Serendipity in Algorithmic Discovery

Host Leslie Poston discusses how algorithmic recommendation systems have replaced everyday accidental discovery, reducing serendipity and narrowing what people encounter. The episode explains psychological and neuroscience research showing novelty’s role in motivation, attention, learning, and memory (including locus coeruleus activation), the inverted-U relationship between complexity and curiosity, and how habituation can flatten engagement when stimuli stay too familiar. Poston contrasts this with the mere exposure effect (Zajonc) and processing fluency, arguing platforms reinforce and shape preferences through repeated exposure, producing “adjacent novelty” rather than true surprise. She links personalization to self-concept via the looking-glass self and self-perception theory, describing identity-shaping pipelines, and argues personalization reduces shared cultural overlap, contributing to epistemological fragmentation. Practical suggestions include turning off autoplay, browsing physical spaces, reading outside one’s interests, and holding preferences lightly to preserve room for the unexpected.

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00:00 Welcome and Setup
01:16 What Serendipity Means
02:03 From Browsing to Algorithms
03:10 Novelty and Learning Science
05:12 Mere Exposure and Reinforced Taste
07:48 Adjacent Novelty Trap
09:29 Algorithms and Identity Mirrors
11:55 Shared Culture and Fragmentation
13:33 Agency and Slow Effects
16:37 Reclaiming the Unexpected
18:34 Closing Thoughts
19:19 Outro and Subscribe

Semantic Derailment and the Social Permission That Sustains Organized Sexual Violence

Host Leslie Poston discusses a CNN investigation into an “online rape academy,” including a Telegram group called ZZZ where nearly 1,000 men allegedly coordinated drugging and sexual assault, shared footage, discussed substances and dosages, and advertised paid live streams; while ZZZ was taken down, the U.S.-hosted site Motherless remains public, drawing about 62 million visits in February and hosting 20,000+ videos tagged with phrases like “passed out” and “eyecheck.” Poston connects this to the Dominique Pelicot case and argues the network has migrated and grown, including related misogynistic trends on TikTok. She critiques the male-dominated focus on disputing the “62 million” figure as moral disengagement and “semantic derailment,” linking it to betrayal trauma, social invalidation, and women’s hypervigilance. Poston argues these reactions provide social permission that enables perpetrators and calls for sustained engagement and pressure so “shame must change sides.”

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00:00 Welcome to PsyberSpace
00:30 CNN Rape Academy Exposed
01:41 Motherless Still Online
02:43 Pelicot Case Parallels
03:46 The Numbers Distraction
05:22 Moral Disengagement Explained
06:49 Betrayal Trauma and Dismissal
08:44 Invalidation and Hypervigilance
10:23 Same System Continuum
12:19 Community Collusion and Cover
13:06 What Real Response Looks Like
13:49 Closing and Call to Action

The Ethics of Reality TV: Deception, Conflict, and What We Normalize

Host Leslie Poston examines the ethical and psychological costs of reality and reality-adjacent TV that relies on deception or engineered conflict, arguing the key issue is whether harm is built into a show’s format rather than whether it is scripted. Using Jury Duty as an example of compromised informed consent and Survivor as an example of formats that reward manipulation, humiliation, and betrayal, she asks what it does to participants and to audiences when cruelty is reframed as “gameplay.” She discusses contestant harms (disorientation, stress, surveillance, reputational damage through editing, and minimal compensation) and viewer effects (social learning, desensitization, parasocial attachment, and moral distancing). She contrasts Squid Game as an explicit critique of exploitation and argues profit, contracts, and aftercare do not equal ethical permission, calling for standards centered on consent, dignity, and psychological safety.

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00:00 Reality TV Ethics
01:47 Harm Built In
03:41 Deception and Consent
06:12 Survivor and Cruelty
08:18 Contestant Fallout
10:57 How Viewers Change
13:19 Culture and Squid Game
15:11 Profit Over People
16:21 Better Standards
18:00 Closing and Callouts

AI Slop and Your Brain: Attention, Fatigue, and the Erosion of Meaning

Host Leslie Poston explains how “AI slop” is industrial-scale synthetic content optimized for volume and fast reactions rather than accuracy or usefulness, ranging from keyword-stuffed articles and fake reviews to fabricated quotes, fake images, and targeted deepfake audio/video. She argues it exploits cognitive shortcuts like attentional capture and processing fluency, creating decision fatigue, weakening deliberate “system two” thinking, and making it harder to suppress irrelevant junk. Repetition fuels the illusory truth effect, increasing perceived accuracy even with fact-check labels and eroding a shared factual baseline. Platforms’ variable-ratio, slot-machine-like feeds reward engagement regardless of truth, selecting for reaction-triggering slop and crowding out careful human work, with documented economic harms to creators and a sense of hollowness or “existential vacuum” for audiences. Poston recommends protecting cognitive resources by spending less time in algorithmic feeds, curating sources, seeking deeper work, and notes a Wharton paper on “cognitive surrender,” plus her 2026 Women in Podcasting nomination.

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00:00 What AI Slop Looks Like
01:09 Industrial Scale Deception
03:04 Brain Shortcuts Exploited
04:52 Decision Fatigue Online
06:35 Illusory Truth Effect
09:14 Slot Machine Feeds
11:35 Emotional Meaning Drain
13:45 Creators and Authenticity
15:06 Verification Tax and Society
16:10 Protect Your Attention
17:53 Cognitive Surrender Study
18:22 Wrap Up and Support

Wharton Paper on Cognitive Surrender

Meta Verdicts, Kids’ Harm, and the Push for Age Verification

Host Leslie Poston reviews two jury verdicts finding Meta liable for harming children: a New Mexico case ordering $375 million in civil penalties for concealing knowledge about child sexual exploitation and mental health impacts, and a Los Angeles negligence case where Meta and YouTube were found liable and Kaylee was awarded $6 million for worsened anxiety and depression from compulsive use starting at ages 6 and 9. Poston cites internal Meta research (Project Myst) and communications likening effects to drugs and gambling, arguing the fine is negligible versus Meta’s $201B revenue. She critiques rapid policy pivots to age verification and digital ID laws, describing requirements like government ID uploads and biometrics via third parties as surveillance, easily bypassed with VPNs, and harmful to those needing anonymity. She notes Meta’s lobbying and covert funding for age-verification groups, and offers questions about beneficiaries, fit to harm, psychology of surveillance, non-technological causes, exposure, and real accountability.

00:00 Welcome and Overview
00:30 Jury Verdicts Against Meta
01:41 Evidence and Accountability Gap
03:00 Policy Pivot to Age Verification
04:11 Surveillance and Anonymity Risks
06:01 Why Our Brains Accept Bad Fixes
08:34 Meta Lobbying and Hidden Incentives
09:40 Five Questions to Ask
12:34 Closing Thoughts

Why “Give 100%” Is Corrosive: Sustainable Performance, Burnout, and Reserve Capacity

Host Leslie Poston examines the phrase “give 100%” in American work culture, tracing it to Protestant work-ethic theology and arguing it became a management tool that moralizes maximum output despite lacking empirical support. The episode contrasts this norm with research on sustainable performance, citing shorter-workweek trials. Poston explains how “100%” ignores unequal baselines via allostatic load, highlights commute and remote-work effects, and details autistic burnout and masking costs. Drawing on Christina Maslach’s burnout research and WHO recognition, the script argues burnout is organizational, not personal, and advocates structural changes and operating below maximum (e.g., “give 60%”).

00:00 Why Give 100%
01:06 Protestant Work Ethic
03:18 No Evidence Just Inherited
04:20 The Math of Depletion
04:52 Four Day Week Proof
06:59 Reserve Beats Extraction
07:49 Unequal Starting Baselines
08:08 Allostatic Load Explained
10:25 Remote Work Stress Relief
11:42 Neurodivergent Hidden Costs
13:14 Masking and Autistic Burnout
15:39 Self Care Myth
16:15 Maslach Burnout Research
19:32 Why the Norm Persists
20:04 Sustainable Performance Science
21:38 A Question for Yourself
22:26 Evidence Based Changes
22:59 Give 60% Closing
23:11 Sign Off