Overconfidence in bullshit detection linked to cognitive blind spots and narcissistic traits

New research published in Thinking & Reasoning provides evidence that people who are least capable of spotting pseudo-profound nonsense often believe they are better at it than others. The study points to a common pattern: individuals with lower bullshit detection skills tend to overestimate their competence and assume they outperform their peers. At the same time, people who report engaging more frequently in persuasive or evasive bullshitting tend to score higher on personality traits such as narcissism and Machiavellianism.

The term “bullshit,” as used in psychological research, refers to communication that is intended to impress or persuade without regard for truth or clarity. This idea builds on the philosophical work of Harry Frankfurt, who defined bullshit as speech that is indifferent to the truth, and G.A. Cohen, who emphasized its “unclarifiability”—that is, statements that sound profound but cannot be easily explained or meaningfully negated.

Examples include pseudo-profound quotes filled with vague buzzwords or abstract claims that evade concrete interpretation. Unlike lies, which are constructed with an awareness of what is true, bullshit tends to reflect a disregard for truth altogether. This distinction makes bullshit particularly difficult to detect, especially when it mimics the form of deep insight without delivering real content.

The motivation behind the new research was to understand why some people are more susceptible to bullshit and less aware of their own limitations in detecting it. The researchers were particularly interested in metacognitive awareness—the ability to accurately assess one’s own cognitive skills—and whether poor bullshit detection stems from a lack of cognitive ability, a desire to protect self-esteem, or certain personality traits associated with social manipulation.

Earlier studies have shown that people with weaker reasoning skills often exhibit a metacognitive blind spot, believing themselves to be more capable than they are—a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the context of bullshit detection, this means that those least able to distinguish vacuous statements from meaningful ones may also be the most confident in their ability to do so. But some people may knowingly engage in bullshitting to influence others or protect their image. By investigating both detection ability and self-reported bullshitting behavior, the researchers aimed to tease apart whether overconfidence is simply a cognitive shortcoming or a socially motivated strategy.

“We were interested in this topic because we had discussions related to the use of the Bullshitting Frequency Questionnaire and the results from our previous study, and we wondered whether people scoring high in self-reported bullshitting behavior actually bullshit more or if they are just more metacognitively aware of this behavior,” said study author Vladimíra Čavojová, an associate professor at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. “However, from this discussion several other ideas came out, and at the end we focused on whether overconfidence in the domain of bullsit detection stems from cognitive limitations, the need to protect self-esteem, or dark personality traits.”

The researchers carried out two preregistered studies with adult participants drawn from the Slovak population. In total, 596 people participated in the first study and 433 in the second. Participants ranged from 18 to 70 years old and were recruited using quota sampling to ensure demographic diversity across age, gender, and education levels. They completed a series of tasks and questionnaires in Slovak using the online platform Qualtrics.

Bullshit detection was measured using a series of statements that mixed pseudo-profound nonsense with genuine motivational sayings. For example, participants were presented with phrases such as “Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity,” “Imagination is inside exponential space time events,” and “Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.” These sentences, which sound lofty but lack clear meaning, were contrasted with motivational quotes like “Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself,” and “A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence.”

Participants were asked to judge each as either “profound” or “not profound.” Their bullshit detection accuracy was then calculated based on how well they distinguished between vacuous statements and those with genuine, interpretable meaning.

To assess metacognitive accuracy, participants estimated their own performance on the detection task and guessed how others would perform. This allowed the researchers to calculate overestimation (how much better people thought they did than they actually did) and overplacement (how much better they thought they did relative to others).

Participants also completed a self-assessment scale measuring the frequency with which they engaged in persuasive or evasive bullshitting. Additional measures included tests of verbal ability, analytic thinking, and personality assessments for narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism, and self-esteem.

In Study 1, the researchers also included an experimental manipulation: participants were randomly assigned to receive positive, negative, or no feedback about their performance to test how threats to self-esteem might influence overconfidence. However, this manipulation had minimal effects and was not central to the final analyses.

Both studies confirmed the existence of a Dunning-Kruger pattern in the domain of bullshit detection. Participants with lower detection ability were significantly more likely to overestimate how well they performed and to believe they were better than others at identifying bullshit. In contrast, participants with higher detection skills tended to underestimate their performance, suggesting a miscalibration in both directions.

Cognitive variables, particularly verbal ability, were strong predictors of actual performance on the detection task. Individuals with better verbal reasoning were more accurate in spotting pseudo-profound nonsense and were also less likely to overestimate their abilities. However, verbal ability explained only a small portion of the variance in participants’ self-rated bullshit detection ability, suggesting other factors play a role in metacognitive misjudgments.

Self-esteem emerged as a key variable in overconfidence. Participants with higher self-esteem tended to give themselves higher performance estimates, regardless of how well they actually did. However, self-esteem did not predict actual bullshit detection accuracy.

Personality traits, especially narcissism and Machiavellianism, were more strongly linked to self-reported bullshitting behavior than to detection ability. Individuals scoring higher on these traits were more likely to admit engaging in both persuasive and evasive bullshitting. Notably, narcissists thought they were better at bullshit detection than they actually were, while also believing others were relatively competent too—a pattern suggesting inflated general confidence rather than outright arrogance.

Interestingly, Machiavellians showed better performance on bullshit detection tasks, despite also reporting higher tendencies to bullshit. This suggests that some individuals may be aware of their own manipulative tendencies and selectively use bullshitting as a social tool rather than out of ignorance.

The researchers found that the frequency of persuasive bullshitting was consistently associated with lower detection skills. People who were more prone to using bullshit to persuade others tended to be worse at recognizing it themselves. This pattern lends support to the idea that bullshitting can function as a compensatory strategy among those with weaker reasoning abilities.

In contrast, cognitive ability had little bearing on evasive bullshitting, which may be more related to social anxiety or self-protection than persuasion. Both types of bullshitting, however, were associated with lower self-esteem, suggesting that people who feel less secure about their abilities may be more likely to use bullshit as a defense mechanism.

“The key takeaway is that people who are most vulnerable to bullshit tend to overestimate themselves the most (they have a blind spot on their own incompetence), and the overconfidence was associated with weaker cognitive abilities and higher self-esteem,” Čavojová told PsyPost. “In other words, the most vulnerable to bullshit are those who are least aware of their own vulnerability. This seems to be especially true for people with narcissistic traits, but interestingly, Machiavellianism seems to help with bullshit detection and is also associated with persuasive bullshitting.”

The researchers acknowledge that their study relies on a specific conceptualization of bullshit—namely, statements that are unclarifiable or pseudo-profound. This approach emphasizes the structure of statements rather than the intentions behind them. As such, the findings may not fully extend to real-world political or persuasive bullshit, which often involves clearer, more emotionally resonant language.

Another limitation concerns the self-report measures of bullshitting frequency. It is possible that participants either underestimated or overestimated how often they engaged in such behavior, due to social desirability bias or poor introspective access.

Future research could explore how bullshit detection and bullshitting behavior operate in more realistic settings, such as political debates, advertising, or online communication. Developing tools that can capture the subtleties of bullshit in everyday life could improve the ecological validity of findings in this field. There is also a need to better integrate different definitions of bullshit into a more unified framework.

The study, “Bullshit detection and metacognitive awareness: the interplay of cognitive factors, self-esteem, and dark traits,” was authored by Vladimíra Čavojová, Jakub Šrol, and Ivan Brezina.