Is Your Bull Shit Detector Turned On @senseicat

I remember someone teaching me how to play Bull Shit card game and thought it was hysterical especially when you got to say B.S. out loud.

"Do you have a good B.S. detector? You need one in our digital age.

The skill of spotting false information—rubbish, nonsense and, yes, fake news—is so important these days that scientists have begun serious research on it. They’re attempting to quantify when and why people spread it, who is susceptible to it, and how people can confront it.

B.S. is a form of persuasion that aims to impress the listener while employing a blatant disregard for the truth, the researchers explained. It can involve language, statistics and charts and appears everywhere from politics to science.

B.S. is different than lying because liars know the truth and push it aside while B.S.ers don’t necessarily care about the truth at all.

Of course this isn’t new. But false information moves faster and farther these days, thanks to social media. A new study conducted by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published earlier this month in the journal Science, analyzed the spread of 126,000 rumors tweeted by 3 million people over more than 10 years and found that false news spreads faster than truth. “We have reached epidemic levels of information pollution."

Website algorithms often favor salacious stories. (YouTube came under fire last month for the way its recommendation algorithm promotes conspiracy-theory videos aimed at viewers on both the left and the right.)

And millions of bots—computer programs that can appear to be real people—also spread false information across the internet.

When do people typically use B.S?

People tend to spread it when they feel obligated to have an opinion about something that they know little about—and when they feel they aren’t going to be challenged on it.

When are we most susceptible to believing B.S.?

When we’re tired, research shows.

But we are also more prone to believing misinformation when it comes from someone who shares our views.

Finally, we fall for B.S. more often when we fail to think analytically."

Install Your Free Detector & Turn It On @senseicat