[Spoiler alert: I may not be the expert you’d need. But read on.]

Without a doubt, one of the odder things to come over the transom lately is this article from PLOS One.

Bulls***-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
Arvid Erlandsson ,
Artur Nilsson,
Gustav Tinghög,
Daniel Västfjäll

Published: July 31, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201474

Abstract

Bulls***-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bulls*** sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bulls***-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bulls***-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bulls*** sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bulls***-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bulls***-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

[Redactions mine.]

My concern, which will surprise no one who knows me, is that I am not entirely sure that “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new” is genuinely profound. I don’t see much depth there. I agree with the sentiment, I think, but it’s banal. By contrast, if one doesn’t find the abstractions off-putting, “Your movement transforms universal observations” may have a certain teasing or enigmatic quality. It does for me. I’m not sure I’d end up thinking it genuinely profound, but at least I don’t hear the wheeze of cliché about it.

So am I more or less BS receptive, more or less prosocial? I don’t know. Also, I don’t live in Sweden, though I have visited there.

What a project.