You know those wankers on your news feed who post up inspirational quotes that they’ve found somewhere online in an effort to – actually I’ve no idea why people do that. I suppose it’s to try and share some wisdom/inspiration with everyone who follows them on Facebook and get them to smash their day, but more often than not it probably has everyone on their feed thinking they’re a complete cretin and deleting them.
If you’re not one of these people – and I assume if you’re reading a website like Sick Chirpse then you aren’t – then there’s some more ammo you can use against (as if you need any more?), as a study from the University of Waterloo in Ontario has found that the people that do this are likely to be stupider than people who don’t.
It was conducted by a cognitive psychologist called Gordon Pennycook who named the study ‘On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bulls***t’ and had it published in the Journal Of Judgment And Decision Making. He had this to say about the study:
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Although bulls**t is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception — critical or ingenuous — has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation.
We focus on pseudo-profound bulls**t, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous.
In order to conduct the experiment, Pennycook interview 845 people. He asked them to evaluate a series of ‘inspirational’ statements and say how profound they thought they were and whether they agreed with them. They then performed a cognitive test.
Those who rated the quotes highly generally scored lower on the tests, meaning they were dumber – as if we didn’t know that already. Bizarrely, they were also found to believe more in the paranormal and conspiracy theories, although I’m not sure what relevance that has to anyone.
But yeah, next time you see one of these quotes and it makes you sick you can feel a lot better about yourself because they’re completely stupid and it’s official. Now here are some inspirational gym quotes applied to getting wasted that actually make a lot of sense.
