Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence

May 9, 2020

By Martin Harry Turpin, et al. 

The ability to navigate social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has at least partially formed to best meet the unique cognitive challenges that emerge in a highly social species. Bullshitting, a style of communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for the truth, is ubiquitous within human societies. 

Across two studies (N = 1,017), we assess whether participants’ ability to produce satisfying and seemingly accurate bullshit (i.e., explanations of fake concepts) acts as an honest signal of their intelligence. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that bullshit ability is predictive of participants’ intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be higher in intelligence. We interpret these results as adding further evidence for human intelligence being naturally geared towards the efficient navigation of social systems. The ability to produce satisfying bullshit may serve to assist individuals in negotiating their social world, both as an energetically efficient strategy for impressing others and as an honest signal of one’s intelligence. 

“being perceived as intelligent may be 

just as valuable to an agent as actually being intelligent”

Regardless of whether bullshit ability honestly signals one’s intelligence, of potentially greater importance is that skilled bullshit producers are perceived by others as highly intelligent. From the perspective of navigating social systems, being perceived as intelligent may be just as valuable to an agent as actually being intelligent, as this perception may afford one opportunities to obtain status and form relationships as well as have greater trust placed in their competence. To this point, we observed a strong positive association between bullshit ability and perceived intelligence. However, this association was found in a situation in which those judging the intelligence of bullshit producers knew nothing of these individuals except their ability to produce satisfying explanations of real and fake concepts. Thus, it is likely that the strength of this association was overestimated in the present work as–with limited information–any signal of quality may have been exaggerated.

The study is published by the University of Waterloo