No bull, political speech is nonsense because it works

DO you think that this is a profound statement? "Intention and attention are mystery's manifestation." What about this one? "Hidden meanings transform unseen beauty." Both statements are, of course, bullshit, understood in a particular sense: not a lie, but a kind of verbal smokescreen, designed to suggest depth and insight but actually vague, vacuous or meaningless. As we will see, an understanding of pretentious-sounding gibberish and its frequent power tells us something important about contemporary politics. But we need a little social science first.

Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, recently led a team of researchers in an investigation of how people react to "pseudo-profound" BS. As an initial te…