Social Psychology, Vol 55(5), 2024, 262-279; doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000561
Bullshitting involves communicating with little to no regard for truth, established knowledge, or genuine evidence in a way that helps people impress, persuade, influence, or confuse others, or to embellish or explain things in an area in which their obligations to provide opinions exceed their actual knowledge in those domains. Put another way, bullshitting encompasses a set of rhetorical strategies employed to help a person sound like they know what they are talking about when they really do not. Although bullshit can be useful to individual bullshitters as a persuasive tool, it can have considerable negative consequences for learning, memory, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs about what is believed to be true. Deeper understanding of the conditions under which bullshitting and general bullibility (i.e., consistent failure to discern bullshit from nonbullshit despite social cues signaling something is bullshit) are likely to emerge should position observers with a more successful vantage point to detect this deceptive behavior in others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)