The importance and credibility of gobbledegook

March 29, 2022 10:53 AM

Hoogeveen et al's "The Einstein effect provides global evidence for scientific source credibility effects and the influence of religiosity" attempts to measure the effect of both scientific and religious authority, in relation to world-view, on perceived credibility in many countries.
posted by eotvos (10 comments total)

“I find this article very credible.” -Albert Einstein.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:26 AM on March 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Well it's definitely credible. It's published in Nature.
posted by saturday_morning at 11:29 AM on March 29, 2022

Seriously though, I do have an issue with their methodology:

Note that we chose a ‘spiritual guru’ authority frame, instead of ‘religious leader,’ because we wanted to avoid selecting an authority specific to any particular religion, to keep the study consistent across countries. Whereas religiosity and spirituality are overlapping but not interchangeable constructs [68,69], self-reported religiosity has been positively associated with belief in spiritual phenomena such as fate, spiritual energy and a connected universe [70,71,72] (though not unequivocally [73]). Consequently, we expected religiosity to be associated with increased receptivity to gobbledegook from a spiritual authority.

I think this is a naive interpretation of the relationship between religion and spirituality. At least from a North American perspective, many actively religious people would be primarily skeptical if not downright hostile towards a nonspecific spiritual figure presumed to be outside of their own religious group. The paper even acknowledges this issue, in an unrelated paragraph:

[E]vangelical Christians were more likely to accept statements opposing their personal views when attributed to an ingroup religious leader versus an outgroup religious leader [59]. This effect was moderated by the amount of contact participants had with the specific group to which the religious leader belonged, highlighting the importance of the person–source fit for message acceptance.

Labeling the non-scientist source 'spiritual guru', at least in some cultures/environments, is tantamount to labeling them 'outgroup religious leader'. So I'm not convinced that the full relative strength of trust in religious figures is captured here. The results may have been quite different if the non-scientist bullshit source was a sage of the study subject's specific religion or spiritual tradition.
posted by saturday_morning at 11:55 AM on March 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

Here's a summary: The Einstein Effect: People Trust Nonsense More if They Think a Scientist Said It.

These statements were generated using the New Age Bullshit Generator, an algorithm that combines new-age buzzwords and seemingly intellectual wording to create phrases that sound profound.

posted by No Robots at 1:25 PM on March 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

Skimming through the article, my first impression is that the article is gobbledegook presented by a scientist. If they were testing how much a person would predicate credibility based on whether or not the material comes from a scientist or a guru, the first issue is that “guru” is a loaded term that does not imply credibility to a whole lot of religious people, especially Christian. To a non-religious person it is also not considered credible. If there was no more info about the source except “scientist” and “guru” then “scientist” probably has less negative connotations than “guru.”

I think a better question is why do people reject the statements of experts? When anti-vaxers are asked why they don’t trust the scientific evidence, the usual response is that they don’t believe in science. In a sense they equate science with religion as it too is something to be believed. Or not believed.

Being someone who has built similar bullshit generators, if the text is presented as actual text from a scientist or guru, people will assume it is not bullshit and will try to understand it as being meaningful text. Except maybe if it came from a guru. The text itself will be syntacticly correct, but the semantics will be all over the place and usually just nonsense. But this is presented as real text so the reader will probably assume that the scientist is talking over their head, but the guru is bullshitting them.

To sum up, the scientists study was designed to favor scientists.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:26 PM on March 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Hume’s Cleanthes made suggestions in this direction."

-Thomas Reid
posted by clavdivs at 9:02 PM on March 29, 2022

This strikes me a likely along the lines of Dunning and Kruger where the conclusion is so congenial to the prejudices of the researchers and their audience that they fail to notice they are assigning quantitative values to variables that can't be measured and are not actually known to exist.

I'm saying, in other words, that OP is talking about some people who have been taken with their own gobbledygook.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:51 AM on March 30, 2022

How about using some real quotations?

• A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.—Einstein
• Science means unresting endeavour and continually progressing towards an aim, which only the poetic intuition may comprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.—Planck
• Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future.—Planck
• According to Spinoza every particular thing or being is a modification of the infinite substance, i.e of God. It expresses itself by each of his attributes, in particular that of extension and that of thought. The first is its bodily existence in space and time, the second is – in the case of a living man or animal – his mind. But to Spinoza any inanimate bodily thing is at the same time also ‘a thought of God’, that is, it exists in the second attribute as well. We encounter here the bold thought of universal animation, though not for the first time, not even in Western philosophy. Two thousand years earlier the Ionian philosophers acquired from it the surname hylozoists. After Spinoza the genius Gustav Theodor Fechner did not shy at attributing a soul to a plant, to the earth as a celestial body, to the planetary system, etc. I do not fall in with these fantasies, yet I should not like to have to pass judgment as to who has come nearer to the deepest truth, Fechner or the bankrupts of rationalism.—Schrodinger
• What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.—Heisenberg
• You sometimes speak of gravity as essential and inherent to matter. Pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know and would therefore take more time to consider of it.—Newton
• A third injury is that agnostic and atheist “secular humanists” have been quietly taught that spirituality is foolish or, at best, questionable. Some secular humanists are spiritual but most are not. We are thus cut off from a deep aspect of our humanity. Humans have led intricate and meaningful spiritual lives for thousands of years, and many secular humanists are bereft of it. Reinventing the sacred as our response to the emergent creativity in the universe can open secular humanists to the legitimacy of their own spirituality.—Kaufmann
• The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we're not inclined to take them seriously ... The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens — it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it — though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that, for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed ... Whence come I, and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.—Schrodinger
• Christian ethics--the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit.—Feynman

posted by No Robots at 7:40 AM on March 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Fascinating, No Robots. I'm not sure I see any woo in the Heisenberg one, and I can't help but giggle, mournfully, at Feynman lecturing anyone on ethics and humility. But, I see your point.
posted by eotvos at 8:35 AM on March 30, 2022

I think their gobbledygook could have been more nonsensical. The second sentence, "We must learn how to learn authentic lives in the face of delusion," is not nonsensical. (The first and third sentences are pretty terrible, though.)

I also found it noteworthy that in this very article, this phrase appears, "... strong religious believers can become more convinced of their beliefs in the face of disconfirmatory evidence..." which is basically saying the same thing as their "gobbledygook" and even uses similar phrasing.
posted by tempestuoso at 10:22 AM on March 30, 2022