"A lot of people are prone to what I call pseudo-profound bulls*," said Gordon Pennycook, a doctorate student at the University of Waterloo who studies why some people are more easily duped than others.
What would constitute an objective standard here? By what standard does the researcher judge which automatically generated statements are meaningless? If the algorithm slings words together into something that one person finds meaningful but another doesn't, who's to say that the more skeptical judge is simply correct? One person might find a poem profound that another finds meaningless, and in that context we don't say one is wrong and the other right, because we understand that reading poetry is an active interplay between the reader and the poem. Why then declare that there is an objective standard of meaningfulness in computer-generated new agey statements? I clicked the bullshit generator a few times. Most of these statements strike me as pseudo-profound junk, but occasionally one pops up that gives me pause. For example, "Turbulence is born in the gap where awareness has been excluded." I read that and thought, yes, it's easy to slip into a frantic spin when you're not paying attention to your life. This randomly generated statement suggests something to me that it might not to someone else. Who's right? There's no right, of course. How you read it depends what you bring to it. So I'm a little suspicious of an experiment that starts out from the premise, "These statements are meaningless." Which isn't to say the experiment is worthless. It shows that people handle these statements differently, and one group might see the other as credulous while the other may see the first as lacking imagination. But if you then ask, "who's right?" you should watch what standards you smuggle in to that question.
Not to mention the utter shittiness of the analysis. You can't interpret the numerical score on a Likert scale literally -- a score of 3 doesn't mean "profound" unless you have more context. This is why researchers using scale judgments convert them to z-scores so you can say whether they were rated more or less profound than the overall average rating. This all required you to have both unambiguously un-profound and profound statements as well as those in the middle. And as you said, there's no objective way to quantify the profundity! This is why social psychology studies never replicate, they're all ridiculous crap like this.....
Not only do I agree that these phrases aren't necessarily meaningless because they were not intended to be hold meaning, but IIRC the 'researcher' said the average ratings for these statements were about ~2.3/5 or "relatively profound" - something that strikes me as merely being worth pause, rather than this genius scholar's successful trickery in getting plebs to believe in like, totally fake philosophy that he like, didn't even muse on.
I wonder if this also relates to humans being "pattern-seeking animals." We first assume there is a pattern to be discerned, and then work to make a pattern appear. That pattern might be, "This sentence reads like BS, but it's probably because I didn't understand it. So let's turn off the BS filter, and see what I can make of it in a more broadly accepting frame of mind."
You know, I think you're absolutely correct here. I think this is related to the availability heuristic, in which people associate topics with the first example to come to mind. So, when you think of something like "awareness" or similarly deep-sounding words, they think about deep-sounding concepts whether the actual message is deep or not.
From an article titled "Why People Think Total Nonense is Really Deep": Is this an ironic piece?The precise reasons that people see profundity in vague buzzwords or syntactic but completely random sentences are unknown.
All words in that sentence have meaning. The exact reason that people see depth in vague words or structured but completely random sentences are unknown. This isn't talking about large or unnecessarily complex sentences, it is talking about meaningless ones. What the article is refering to is sometimes known as woo. See this for an example:
My confusion doesn't stem from the sentence I quoted. It stems from the fact that an entire study was commissioned which essentially concludes that "some people are pretty stupid", but makes ample use of polysyllabic words to appear sophisticated. Look, see how I can do it too? An elementary grasp of IQ distribution invalidates any necessity for conducting this study.
Excellent response, and a reminder that I shouldn't Hubski before breakfast. Also, I hate psychology. Sorry.