John Petrocelli | The Life Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

Srini Rao

John, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

John Petrocelli

Thank you for having me.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure to have you here. So you have a book out called the life-changing science of detecting bullshit Which I as we said, you know before we hit record was probably one of my top five favorite books that I read this entire year all of which we will get into and I want to start with what I think is a very relevant question given your background and the work that you do and that is what social group were you a part of in high school and What impact did that end up having on what you ended up doing with your life and your career?

John Petrocelli

Wow, great. Yeah, I was actually in a small group, I guess, of what you might call nerdy jocks. I was in a nerdy jock group. Whereas I did sports throughout the year, football, wrestling, track, anything, really. But academics still came first. And I was just interested in.

really everything. By the time I got to college, I really wasn't sure what I was going to do because I had so many interests. But yeah, if there's one sort of prototypical group that I guess I belonged to during my elementary and high school years leading into college, it was that. That also spilled into college. So I had quite

an array of interesting friends too, because I had friends in both, sort of both groups, the sports addicts and the people who just wanted to learn or had interest in science and math and things like that, that really kept me busy. I was a busy kid.

just read as much as I could. I, for some reason or another, I was attracted to books on Vietnam War when I was like 12 or 13 for some reason. I don't know, they kind of looked interesting. And I read, I mean, I'd be reading a letters home from, um, from Vietnam, you know, at 12 and 13. And, and, um, sort of just went, went from there and then reading, uh, sports books and then, and then into, into classics.

F Scott anything F Scott Fitzgerald great Gatsby just captivated me the writing is just Beautiful and so yeah, I was sort of a I guess sort of an anomaly Because you don't you really don't see many of those and I try to recruit these types of students to my research lab Because I know they're out there And and you know talent and creativity or I think they're spread throughout

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

John Petrocelli

pretty evenly throughout the masses. And so I try not to pigeonhole students into one group, because I certainly wasn't in just in a single group. And I think that's, it's led me to a career that fits me perfectly. So I'm at Wake Forest University, a social psychologist and Department of Psychology.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

This was my number one, really, it was really my number one dream job because there truly is a, I think there's a lot of lip service from one university to another that value both teaching and research. But I really think Wake Forest is one of the best compromises of that and values both teaching and research equally. So.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Hehehe

John Petrocelli

I've always been sort of a hybrid and interested in just more than one thing and that's I think Has also kind of led also led my research career as well

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you know, the thing that really strikes me about you is that you seem to have had this very deep intellectual curiosity that really kind of sustained throughout your life from a very young age. You're an educator. Why do you think that isn't more common? Why do you think people don't ever discover that in high school? And a lot of us, you know, go all the way through college. And by the way, we share a love for Fitzgerald in common. That's why I actually became a writer. But the thing is, it didn't come full circle until 20 years later and getting fired from every job.

John Petrocelli

Yeah.

Srini Rao

I ever had and you know as an educator what do you think happens to that? Like I feel like I don't know many people like you in that sense or I didn't when I was growing up.

John Petrocelli

Yeah, if I could go back to those days, what I would have applied, if I had known then what I know now, I would have explored much more doing, maybe some job shadowing, internships, practicums, those types of things, or anybody that would take me in that I was interested in even for a day or a week or whatever, unpaid, just to explore the world of work.

Even by the time I was in, in psychology halfway through my undergraduate, uh, degree, I still didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. And I sort of foreclosed early on, well, I guess I'll be a social worker or a psychotherapist or a counselor or clinician of some type. I thought, well, that's what everybody does in psychology, but that's not true. Um, there are, there are positions everywhere.

and business marketing, organizational behavior in law. I mean, it's all over the place. Statistical applications are useful everywhere, and these are things that psychology majors should and could take more advantage of if they actually saw what the world of work actually looked like. So that's what I do is encourage students to.

to seek those opportunities and see what it's like for eight hours a day, you know, because honestly, I got quite bored in the clinical arena. Okay, I was a much more of a researcher. I like to surround myself with interesting people and interesting ideas and explore those even more through the science of psychology. And that wasn't even on the radar for me.

during my undergraduate years, because I didn't know that you could have a career in that. So I would have done more of that. And I think that so many students also, they tend to foreclose. If they do lean towards education, it's really based on the fact that they've sort of job shadowed, in a sense, from kindergarten through 12th grade.

John Petrocelli

public or private school, that's the one profession that they have seen more than any, is the teacher. And a lot of people are attracted to the profession, and when you ask them, so why did you become a teacher? Why did you become a high school teacher? Or whatever, and a lot of them will tell you, unfortunately, well, you get.

You get the summers off and all the holidays off. And it's pretty easy once you do it for a few years. And I'm thinking like, gee, well, it sounds like the last thing you want to do is teach. You go straight towards all the times that you won't have to be. Now, certainly, we have wonderful, well-trained, passionate teachers today. But I don't think, until we.

Srini Rao

Hahaha.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

Until we start paying teachers what they actually deserve, it's not gonna be a profession that attracts the best and brightest. The same thing happened with nursing many years ago. Until people realized that the quality of nursing has a huge impact on the quality of healthcare delivery, until we realized that, we really weren't paying nurses what they.

what they deserve. And then as soon as we did, then healthcare improved right away. And then you also had people that weren't usually looking at the career, like men for instance, being interested in nursing. I don't think we're gonna see a change until we attract the best and brightest to be teachers. I think it's one of the most important jobs there really is. And I think it's just not valued.

John Petrocelli

across the board as much as it should be. And we're passing on some of the best and brightest towards the profession simply because we're just, we're not valuing them enough.

Srini Rao

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was funny that we're talking about that because this morning I was writing, I was like, I think teachers are the most underpaid, underappreciated people in our society because every one of us can probably point to a role that a teacher played in our life. I think teachers cause us to end up where we're at and they don't get anywhere near the credit they deserve. But one other thing that I wonder about, I always jokingly say that, despite being a Berkeley undergrad and having an MBA, I'm a failed byproduct of the education system because I had terrible history with jobs.

And, you know, to your point, I think that one of the things that ends up happening is people pigeonhole themselves very early on with, you know, collection of no data points. It's like, oh, you know, Indian parents basically say go become a doctor whose kid has never set foot in the hospital or taken a science class basically makes a decision about how they're going to spend the rest of their life. So one thing that I did, this is something I ask every single person who I talk to that's a college professor. You know, we're in kind of a mess as far as higher education goes for student outcomes.

John Petrocelli

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

They're not starting families, they're not buying cars, they're not doing the things that actually move the economy forward because they can't. So if you were tasked with redesigning the education system from the ground up to prepare us for the next 50 years, what would you do? Which I realize is a massive question.

John Petrocelli

Yeah, well, I've thought about this a lot, and I hope my answer is acceptable. I don't have any data that speaks to the effectiveness of it, but I have a very strong hypothesis that if you improve and focus on basic communication skills, work that back into the curriculum. And...

While you do that, work back into the curriculum, basic critical thinking skills. So when I was growing up, people asked for the time. They would interrupt. They would say, excuse me, sir. Can I please have the time? Today, when people, if they don't have their smartphone on them, they're not checking their, or they don't have a watch on them.

Today it's like, hey, what time is it? And I'm like, are you talking to me? The basic communication skills are suffering. People are not learning this in their 12 or 13 years of elementary and secondary schooling. So critical thinking skills also has, I think, just gone out.

the window even before I was a senior in high school. I think it was my senior year in high school that my science, my biology teacher, asked us for a homework assignment to simply critique the book. So he had assigned a new textbook he hadn't used before. And

We all sat there thinking, like, what in the world is he asking us to do? Critique the book. He even gave us examples. He said, I'd like you to critique the paper, the pictures. How easy is it to understand, to find things? And we were all kind of clueless as to what he wanted. And I know most of us didn't actually give him what he wanted in this homework assignment. But that was the first time somebody asked me for my opinion in a class to.

John Petrocelli

to give an informed opinion about something that wasn't just repeating back facts or things that I had learned in class. So basic critical thinking skills can take us so much further in life decisions, whether they're academic career or relationship decisions.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

John Petrocelli

basic way I thought about what you were saying is that the messiness of data collection, we know from scores of cognitive psychology studies and social psychology studies that personal and even professional experience is the major driver of the inferences that people make about the world, how things work, and what's going to happen in the future.

OK, so that data collection method, though, is rather messy. OK, it is what we get through our own personal experience oftentimes is random. It's unrepresentative. It's ambiguous. It's absolutely incomplete considering the number of things that can happen and the types of data that you can actually collect. It's certainly inconsistent. And many times, it's indirect. It's second or third hand.

Srini Rao

Hehehe.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

And oftentimes surprising or counter attitudinal and not necessarily things we always want to count So then you take the example of kind of figuring out, you know 17 or 18 year old trying to figure out like okay. What what do I want to get into? What what do I want to train myself and prepare myself for? For a career it is extremely messy and the data collection needs to be

It needs to be different, but the critical thinking skills and basic communication skills, I think will take Students much further along optimal decision making the path of optimal decision making more so Than all of the facts that they learn There's a great study actually done. I'll never forget the it's

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

It's rarely cited, but it's one that I've been sort of broadcasting throughout my career. And it was a study done by Marsha Baxter-Migolda. And she studied at Miami University of Ohio. She did a longitudinal study with the same group of students for all four years of their undergraduate days. And she interviewed them.

their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. And she asked them in the interviews some of the same questions each time. One of the questions she asked them was, where does knowledge come from? How do you define knowledge? And what she found was in their freshman year, most students think, well, knowledge comes from the textbooks. It comes from the authorities. It comes from my notes and the lectures. And

What she did, she found that by the time they were seniors, they were finally scratching the surface of realizing that knowledge is actively constructed, that they actually have a role in understanding and contributing to what we think of as established knowledge, like in science. We know that probably half of what we think is true, certainly in psychology, maybe less so in some of the hard sciences.

But certainly in psychology, I mean I tell half of my students, I tell them half of what you are going to learn this semester is probably wrong. Or that it's maybe partially correct. Under these circumstances, in these situations and contexts, it's correct. But then, when you change the context of the situation, it's actually wrong. Actually the opposite is correct. And as we continue to find these factors that we call the moderators,

Srini Rao

Hahaha

John Petrocelli

or the factors that interact with the variables that we already know, it becomes fascinatingly complex. And you're just not, I don't think you're ready for that if you don't have a good grounding and basic kind of critical thinking skills and asking like, well, how do I know this is true? What kind of evidence actually led me to this conclusion? And until you start to scratch the surface that I think.

Most students are just kind of shooting in the dark and they will develop attitudes and opinions and beliefs, but that doesn't mean that they're going to be based on evidence, like genuine, ideal evidence as opposed to explanation, which is often confused for evidence.

Srini Rao

Well, I think that makes a perfect segue into actually talking about the concepts in the book And I think the thing that made me laugh was that you literally call your lab the bullshit studies lab How in the world did you arrive at a place where? This is what you decided to make the focus of your life's work and how in the world does university get away with get calling You know a lab the bullshit studies lab

John Petrocelli

Yes. Yeah.

John Petrocelli

Yes, well I have a big sort of favor already completed for me by Harry Frankfurt, the analytic philosopher emeritus, professor emeritus from Princeton University, who had written a paper in 1986 called On Bullshit, and he defined it as a topic worthy of studying empirically.

He defined bullshit as just communicating with little to no regard for evidence, truth, established knowledge, and basically talking about things of which one knows little to nothing about. And by that definition, we could say, well, that's got to be one of the most pervasive social behaviors there are. But some people took him seriously. Some people thought it was, you know,

cute and a joke, but he was dead serious. And when I encountered the paper, I thought, OK, no one's really going to take this seriously. I would love to look at when does it occur? Why does it occur? Under what circumstances can we attenuate this behavior? What are the consequences? Are there benefits to it? Are there drawbacks? Why do people do it so much? Because by that definition, gee, that's hard.

It's hard not to bullshit because to do the opposite, to be connected with genuine evidence, establish knowledge and truth consistently and constantly is very, very difficult to do. And so the number of things that we're supposed to have opinions about, and we often feel obligated to have and share opinions about, is so large that it's.

It's just impossible to have a well-informed opinion about everything. It's just, it would take forever. We wouldn't communicate much at all. This podcast would be maybe three days instead of an hour, because it would take us time to do the fact checking. It just, we wouldn't really function. So that work was sort of already done in 2000, I believe 2005, like 19 years later.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

A publisher took Harry Frankfurt's 20 page article and made it into a book. And it's one of the best selling books in philosophy of all time. But for word for word, it's that 20 page article. The pages are smaller and the margins are big and the font size is big. But I used this definition and thought we need to know more about this. I was quite dismayed to find that.

When I started this work about 10 years ago that there was really nothing that psychological science had contributed to understanding this behavior and here I am I'm a social psychologist I'm supposed to understand you know thoughts feelings and behaviors and how those are influenced by the context the situation whether it's It's it's real or imagined and I can't tell you

I couldn't tell you in 2010 why people BS and what the consequences were. Those basic questions we didn't have answered. So I tackled it and I thought there's no better word for this behavior, which is distinct from lying. It's not lying. It's often confused for lying. But bullshitting is not lying. So the liar knows and cares about the truth. And the liar does not.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

believe what it is they say. The bullshit are on the other hand doesn't care what the truth is. They're not paying any attention, they're not paying any attention to it, they don't care what the truth is. In fact what they say sometimes just by chance, by accident, is actually correct but even they wouldn't know it because they're not paying any attention to truth, established knowledge or genuine evidence. Okay but and the bullshit are often does believe what it is they say. Okay so those are the

Srini Rao

Haha

John Petrocelli

some big differences. Also socially, we treat bullshitters with usually a kind of a social pass of acceptance. We think, oh, it's not a big deal. He's just BSing us. But if your friend lies to you, usually that's followed up with quite a bit of anger and disdain, and your friend may have to tell a hundred truths in the future to now gain their...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

for them to gain our trust and our sense of their honesty. So they're very different. The consequence, social consequences are very different. You could be fired for lying, right? But for bullshitting, it's like, oh, she's just trying to connect with people. Yeah, yeah.

Srini Rao

You might even get promoted for being a good bullshit. Yeah, well, so this is why I think this book struck me so much, because we live in the sort of information age. You know, I interview people and it's funny, I tell my, you know, people who I teach to frequently to consider the possibility that what I'm telling them is bullshit, because it might be in the context of their lives. And so that's one of the things that struck me so much about this book was that you really went deep. You know,

One of the you open the book by saying, although it's an unfortunate reality, many of our memories, beliefs, attitudes and decisions are based on bullshit rather than evidence based reasoning. This is why a deeper understanding of bullshit might be one of the most important intellectual and social issues that we face. And you say perhaps the greatest cost of bullshit is the fact that the time and effort required to undo its unwanted effects can be exponentially greater than time and effort needed to produce it. Bullshit can be produced in a matter of seconds, yet refuting it may take years.

And then you go into a number of different things what I think really struck me. So let's start with the personality test because that was really fascinating. You said personality tests alone can't explain behavior and performance to people who have the same personality type may vary greatly in their behaviors depending on the context. Yet think about how often corporations, individuals use personality tests to make career decisions, to make hiring decisions, all that stuff. So like, why is this? And what's the negative consequence of this?

John Petrocelli

Yes.

John Petrocelli

Well, the negative consequence would certainly be, I think, basing hiring decisions, promotion decisions, personnel decisions on these sort of, I want to call it, they're almost make-believe assumptions about the connections between personality and the fit for.

particular type of task that one is going to do from nine to five every day. You know, so all of the data that we have on, you know, Myers-Briggs types of personality tests and there's a whole sort of army of these things that have been standardized, we know that these can be useful ways, using these types of tests, can be useful ways to describe behavior.

And oftentimes, they do show some sort of test, retest reliability in the sense that if you've got one Myers-Briggs code today, you might have the same code tomorrow. There are changes. But generally, these can be decent. But you've got to remember that these tests are all self-reported. So this is just a fancy way.

of describing how people tend to describe themselves. So if you respond to 100 questions on a personality test and you say true for some and false for others, the test is gonna be scored and then we're gonna give you some feedback on basically in more eloquent language than most people can produce themselves is a description of what you said about yourself.

It's an indirect. So a lot of times people are amazed by how, how it, it seems to tell us exactly what we already think about ourselves, but why not? Why wouldn't it? It's just like looking into a mirror and making it look a little more flowery, you know, a little, a little bit better. Um, but, but the predictive validity, if we say, okay, well, you know, this person has, is, um,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

John Petrocelli

took a big five personality test in their highest on conscientiousness and agreeableness and openness. Okay, and we say, all right, now let's see, let's try to make some connections between what kind of jobs they should be doing or what kind of work units they should be in and what we can ask them to do. And there are no data, conclusive data, that show that, okay, if you match

this personality profile with these various situations that they're going to succeed, you know, ipso facto it's, you know, that, you know, you know, a strong correlation or a strong predictive value, it's just not there. So that's why I've already, you can take two people with the exact same, you know, personality profiles

And one could be completely happy and productive and in the best position possible. Another, in a different situation, maybe they're doing the same kind of job, but maybe the office is arranged differently, or just some subtle things in the context, and they're completely miserable, and they're unproductive because of it. And so when you start to account for

context and situation in these standardized personality measures. Until you do that, you're not going to have really any data that will speak to this kind of personality situation context fit that is ideal for productivity, you know, creativity and bottom line performance. So many of them are marketed as though they do that, but

I'm not aware of any measures that actually look at the person by situation interactions carefully enough to say that, okay, well, the person with this profile should be in this type of work atmosphere. It's just not there. So there's a lot of fluff, and I think it's built on this sense that, oh, yes, it tells me exactly what I think of myself.

Srini Rao

Hahaha

John Petrocelli

And people are just, they're sold by that. They just seem so amazed. And that's how these measures are usually marketed. It's like, okay, take the measure and then see what your feedback is. And then people are amazed, but they forget that all they did was just indirectly reported to the measurement what they already think about themselves. Why would they disagree? Why would you disagree with something that you've said about yourself?

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so then you go into what you say are the three good reasons why people tend to neglect the better voices of critical thinking and, you know, end up forking over good money for bullshit. One is a preference for bullshit over truth. The second is here. You know, the idea of hearing is believing. And the third is the power of intuition. Let's go to the first two. I think the intuition one is really fascinating to me because intuition is such a big buzzword in the world of self-improvement. But let's get to that last. Let's talk about the first two.

John Petrocelli

Okay, okay, so the preference for bullshit, right? This can be a cognitive, a mental tendency, or it can be just completely motivational, right? So people, there's a strong tendency to adhere to what we call the confirmation bias. And it was almost wired to attend to that information,

that from our messy data collection that is just based on our own personal experiences, rarely anything more than that, we attend to information that confirms our ideas about the world. And we like that. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we're correct. And completely ignore anything that disconfirms it. Sometimes when it's compelling data, we think more about it.

John Petrocelli

if it does disconfirm our hypotheses, the more we think about it and the more information we get about that source of information, the more likely we are going to discredit it. We know from studies, social psychology done in the mid-70s, that was a strong tendency. If you just give people some results of a study, there was this experimental study done and actually...

It's counter to your beliefs about the connection between guns and violence, let's say. And you take someone who's pro-gun, and they will show a little bit of a shift towards the opposite attitude, towards the implications of the results. But if you just tell them, this is the result, that in the 15 states that had this, they actually showed.

John Petrocelli

more violence with guns and the thing. Right now, just given the results, they tend to change their attitudes. But if you start to give them details or they have time to look at the details on their own about that study, they tend to boomerang, rebound back to their initial attitude even more so because they tend to discount it. They say, oh, the study was done in Texas.

Or, oh, it only had 15 states. That's not even half the states. And, oh, they only used women as the participants or something. They'll find ways to discredit that information. So now we're back to just hyper-focusing on the initial hypothesis. And so sometimes by giving people facts, it just causes them to rebound or to

to double down even more strongly to their initial opinions and attitudes and beliefs. So that's, so that's, there's, there's many, there's a preference for that because if there are two social motives that are strongest from the last, I guess, 70 years of social psychology research that we know, the two, two of the most frequent strongest motivations

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

to be correct and to feel justified in what we voice, what we publicize as our beliefs or in our attitudes, our opinions. And then the second one is to be consistent. To be correct and to be consistent. And those two motives can conflict with one another, and especially if you publicize your opinions, your beliefs, and your attitudes.

It's very difficult for people to turn back and say, you know what, Serenity, I was wrong about that. I didn't think that all through. I didn't have all of the data at the time. Now that I got more information, I realized that my initial, that's so hard for people to say, you know, and to do. So.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Srini Rao

Oh, I mean, there are things I've written in my own books that I would go back and revise, uh, you know, based on, you know, a couple more years of life, you know, I mean, in the interest of time. So there's, I think the place that I really want to take this next and it'll tie into, you know, sort of intuition and, you know, uh, hearing is believing. Cause I think for people listening, this to me was one of the most important parts. It was this whole idea of people who are high propensity bullshitters, right? And you said they're high propensity bullshitters are remarkably easy to spot. They're the type of people who are often found.

evangelizing and proselytizing their beliefs to anyone willing to listen. That's the entire world of self-improvement. That's everybody on this podcast. That's every one of my guests, you, me, and every guest that ever showed up. Now, I wouldn't necessarily criticize them for some of this stuff, but you brought up a lot of things I think are really big. The disregard for evidence, which I think is rampant in the world of self-improvement on the internet. The other is...

John Petrocelli

Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Srini Rao

complete reliance on anecdotal evidence and then pseudo profound language. So I'd love for you to talk about this in the context of sort of the world that people listening to this are living in because they consume this type of information. They listen to people like you, they read books like mine, they go to Tony Robbins seminars. I think of all the things that ever struck me the most on the podcast, we had Rick Allen Ross who's a cult deprogramming expert here. And he said, nobody has done a properly peer reviewed research study on the effects of

improvement seminars to show that the long-term outcomes actually lead to improvements in people's lives. But I'd love for you to talk about this because you criticized TED Talks even though I know you gave one yourself. So let's go into this, like expand on the pseudo-profound language, anecdotal evidence, and all the things that, I mean, these are all things that literally I see on the internet all day long. And I probably have done most of them myself.

John Petrocelli

Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And honestly, when you have any hypothesis about how the world works, the way people actually operate, and no matter what it is, it's rather easy to find at least a couple of good stories that support the idea. And people are attracted to stories. They're memorable. They tug at the heartstrings more.

They get people to think more. They give them... It's also easier to talk about that, right? As opposed to the statistics of the masses, right? This is one of the reasons why charitable organizations will run major ads, and they'll tell you about this one child who's starving and...

some part of the world and they give you all of the basic information about that one child you know because they know people that'll move people more mentally and behaviorally more so than the hundreds of thousands millions of people who are starving you know so you don't give people statistics you don't give them it's not good to give them the facts better to give them a story and it's just easy for people to find that and the basic pattern that I've

argued that the bullshit artists tend to use is they exploit that as much as possible. They'll tell you about their best friend or their cousin or their neighbor who had a reaction to and they're sure that it was caused by a vaccine. Like they're certain that they've got this.

this one piece of information, now it drives everything, it colors everything that they see, and who cares about any of the data that is coming from multiple independent lines of inquiry among people who don't always agree, actually they rarely agree. I mean, scientists and medical professionals, they're the first people to tell each other that they're wrong.

John Petrocelli

You know, so to see that, to believe as though there's some big meeting that everyone's colluding and on the same page is just completely insane. It does not have any grounding in the way things actually work. But if you don't know how science and medicine, things like that, actually work, it's easy to weight a couple of anecdotal pieces of, you know, of data.

for that to drive. The other thing that the bullshitter artists tend to do, again, is focus on just unreliable types of data that they get and they know other people get through personal experience. Because even if you don't have a friend that was injured by or had some kind of bad reaction to a vaccine that...

You might know someone who knows someone who did that. Now you can use the story if it suits your purposes. And then people use, they use proverbial cliches all of the time, as though if there's some sort of, some sort of wisdom hidden in this, the idea of these popular cliches, like opposites attract.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

you know, versus, you know, birds of a feather flock together. I mean, usually when you focus on these proverbial cliches, you're going to find that there's another one that sort of disproves it, right? It's equally correct. So but that's not, the bullshitter is not going to make salient both of those. They're going to just focus on why one is correct.

And here's the anecdotal data that support it. But they also tend to exaggerate their own area of expertise. Even if they don't have expertise, they can make people think, I've got expertise in this. And what we do know is people who are often most confident about their competence and expertise are often the least competent.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Right.

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

People have been writing about this Dunning-Kruger effect for over 20 years now, and it's just the basic idea that the cognitive skills, the mental skills that you need to be competent in an area are the same mental skills that you need to recognize your own and others' competence. So people will express this unabashed overconfidence often in some areas that they really don't know anything about. And now if your audience...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

John Petrocelli

knows as much or less, it's relatively easy to get away with. Because they're less likely to call you on BS. This is one of the reasons why I don't... I'm not going to bullshit an auto mechanic. I just don't know enough about how cars are... They're going to know right away that I'm bullshitting and I don't know what I'm talking about. And then if they don't lead on to that, now maybe they can take advantage. Now they know I don't know what I'm talking about.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Hahaha Yeah

John Petrocelli

now I might be taking advantage of. They might say, oh, this guy's a real sucker. He thinks he knows what he's talking about. No, I'll tell him that he needs some other thing that needs done that is maybe just window dressing stuff that he doesn't really need. So it's just, when we make it easy for people to kind of get away with, they'll take advantage of it. And one of the first things I've learned in my earliest studies on this behavior was that people will do it in every situation.

except one and that is that you don't make them feel obligated to share an opinion and You don't make it easy to get away with so if you can even it demonstrate Well, I know I know some things about this topic and I I've got some Expertise of my own or my I got some knowledge in this topic you can signal to the bullshitter that well, maybe They're not going to get away

with bullshit because you probably know what you're talking about. And so that's one of the ways to expose ourselves like right away. But they don't ask, bullshit artists also don't, they're not going to ask and make salient the critical thinking skills questions that we need to be asking them when we can communicate with them directly. There's only three questions that you really need to ask. It's much simpler than...

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely.

John Petrocelli

than people realize. But the first question that we should ask is, what? What is the claim? If we suspect someone of bullshit artistry, we should say, well, what exactly are you saying? I hear you saying X. Is what you are saying X? And these other implications. Usually what will happen is bullshit artists will start to clean it up right away. They'll say, well, here's what I'm talking about. And just make.

the claim as clear as possible, because we know that clarity is a major antidote to bullshit. So they'll do us a favor by exposing us less, by starting to clean up and say, well, no, I'm not actually saying that Bill Gates and George Soros actually paid people to invade the Capitol on January 6th. What I really mean is that there are people who...

Srini Rao

What?

John Petrocelli

have a lot of money that are running this, they might reframe it that way, right? So now you've already gone halfway, so then you work with that. And then once you get through what and clarify the claim, just ask how, how do you know that? How did you come to that conclusion? And even better sometimes, how would you know that claim or that idea is wrong, okay?

That's a much better question than why. If you ask why questions, usually what you're going to get is very heady, value-laden, very abstract reasons, an explanation for things. But you won't get people to talk about evidence. You'll get them to talk about evidence if you ask them how. How do you know? And if you can get through those, ask, have you considered this alternative?

You know, all three of these questions, what, how, and have you considered an alternative, they help us diagnose the real motivation behind the bullshit artist. How connected are they to truth, genuine evidence, and established knowledge? And then we can make a better decision as to whether or not we're buying what they're saying.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, I think, you know, I love that you brought this up because there's two pieces of this that I really want to ask you about. You talked about this whole idea of pseudo profound language and you say it's intentionally obscured through exaggerations, ambiguous references, insider jargon, buzzwords, and authoritative pretense that the speaker knows about things that no one else can possibly comprehend and you say pseudo profound bullshit contains vacuous and confusing words that obscure meaning and invite people to fill in the gaps with whatever they think the nonsense means while Deepak referring to Deepak Chopra comes away sounding brilliant.

John Petrocelli

Yes.

Srini Rao

him up of all people. Because like there's a joke among Indians is like, this guy's not a medicine, he's not a medical practitioner. He's an online marketer. But the thing is, I don't think it's isolated to him. And I think that, you know, you also bring up a point about Ted talks. What do you want people to know who are listening to this about figures like Deepak Chopra and content like Ted talks?

John Petrocelli

Mm-hmm.

John Petrocelli

I think the thing to know is that, I guess the major thing to know is that a lot of it is bullshit. And second, that one of the reasons why we don't confront it is that people think, one, that they can usually detect that, and two, that it doesn't really have any negative effects. Okay? And we know that it has...

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

John Petrocelli

a lot of negative effects on learning, memory, decision making, what people believe to be true. What you believe to be true has an incredible impact on judgments and decisions. And until people come to grips with that and accept that, one, they are susceptible to being duped by bullshit, and they're not as good at detecting as they think they are, and again, two, to understand that there are.

great disadvantages to being influenced by bullshit. So there are so many, I mean, even if you get into, you go outside of new age alternative medicine, outside of Deepak Chopra world and also into business. I mean, we see a lot of business speak and corporate gibberish do the very same thing. There was a survey done, I think, over 15 years ago, and they had 10,000 entries and they just asked people, what are the biggest bullshit words that you hear?

in the office and, and the, some of the top 10 words were words like leverage value, add bandwidth, touch base, incentivize synergy, win-win thoughtware words like that, that people use all of the time in, oh, best practice, you know, like, you know, that, I mean, it's just all kinds of words that, that again, yeah, you can fill in what they mean and then they're, then they're useful. Um, but, but

Srini Rao

Hehehehe

John Petrocelli

people don't realize that how ambiguous they actually are. And until I think when they start to realize, OK, this isn't clear, and it's not helping me in my judgment, in my decision as to what's actually going on, until it comes to grips with that, they're going to continue to be exposed to the unwanted effects of bullshit. Now, you mentioned TED Talks. I may also be one of the only.

TED Talks speakers, TEDx speakers to actually criticize TEDx, TED Talks within my talk because there, there is a lot of BS. But it, it really, it mirrors the things that we're seeing for decades now in the, the latest groundbreaking ideas and leadership and success. I mean, there's so many titles.

Srini Rao

I'm going to go.

John Petrocelli

even in bestselling titles in business today that are completely contradictory. You know, there's a title on using love to lead. Well, at the same time, there was a book called Businesses Combat. There was literally, and this was my favorite one, it's called Out of the Box.

Srini Rao

Hehehehe

John Petrocelli

strategies for achieving profits today and growth tomorrow. At the same time, there was a book called Thinking Inside the Box, the 12 Timeless Rules for Managing Success. So all of this stuff is really just a conglomeration of ideas that haven't actually been tested. So it's the marketplace of ideas that is just inundated with nothing more than ideas. They're not things that are.

actually empirically validated. And if it sounds intuitive, it might sound interesting and groundbreaking, profound. And it's going to have an influence. People are going to read books like, um, uh, in search of excellence, you know, and make, uh, make decisions and think, okay, well, yeah, what we really need to do is improve our hospitality, you know, uh, 7-11 did a study years ago.

ago after they found that their hospitality training really didn't have much of an effect on sales. They thought it should after reading in search of excellence, right? But they didn't actually test it. They tested it afterwards. People who enter convenience stores do not really care about the hospitality so much. They just want to get in and out, you know? But if you focus on hospitality, then the lines get longer and people get grumpy.

because they're waiting in line longer than they should be because now someone who's connecting with the employees in the store now is telling their life story, right? When you just want to pay for your diet coke and get fuel and get out. You know, so, but the experiment, the experimental method and testing empirically ideas take us much, much further than what appears to be the new.

profound, groundbreaking ideas. There are often times, they're just old ideas, just waiting for someone to actually test and see if they actually have an impact on behavior. So, yeah, full of assumptions and cliche, kind of, you know, you can be the best and be the most productive, you can be anything that you wanna be. I mean, that talk has been done so many times, and it's just, but it can be uplifting. People want...

Srini Rao

Hehehehe, yeah.

John Petrocelli

You know, people like it and they watch it. But there's a better way. I mean, optimal judgment and decision-making, I think, takes people much further along the paths that they actually want to go than a lot of this untested bullshit that we see kind of plastered everywhere.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, I think the place I want to wrap up is with talking briefly about, you know, the idea of personality traits, right? Because I think there are a lot of people who are like, oh, I'm way too smart to fall for this bullshit. Or, but you go into the idea that, you know, intelligence is not enough to protect you from bullshit. Common sense isn't enough, like in there are certain personality traits. Like, so basically all of us are susceptible. I mean, I know that I bought into a lot of bullshit at times. I mean, I joined a cult for six years thinking it would help me meet women.

John Petrocelli

Mm-hmm.

John Petrocelli

Mm-hmm.

John Petrocelli

Okay.

Srini Rao

was called the seduction community. Neil Strauss wrote this entire book about it, you know, and we took a handful of outliers and we decided that, oh, those guys knew what they're talking about. And those guys all turned out to be sociopaths.

John Petrocelli

Wow, yeah. Yeah, that's much more common. I mean, it just depends on how people define cults. I mean, some people, even based on their political agenda and positions, often see people on the other side as though they belong to some sort of cult. You hear people talk about that. And people are much more susceptible.

to cult-like ideas than they realize. Especially in today's world, where it's so easy to lock yourself into this echo chamber of life, whether it's real or it's digital, it's very easy to become more and more polarized in our beliefs and opinions because

once you surround yourself with like-minded people, we've known this from actually the even mid-60s and from social psychological work, that you put people together with like-minded opinions and attitudes, they become more polarized. They become stronger in those beliefs because now I heard something that, you know, an argument that you made that I didn't actually think about before. Now I think of it even more strongly, or you've debunked some other.

idea from the opposition and now I feel I have another reason to have the belief. It's really easy to kind of get you know trapped in that echo chamber and rabbit hole of beliefs if you're not looking at things from a critical, you know critical thinking skills 101 standpoint and being open to Things that you don't necessarily agree with on the surface. I think people are usually quite reasonable.

However when they have good information. So I've argued that good, better information does not always lead to better judgment and decision making, but better judgment and decision making almost always require better information. And once people are open to that, I think they tend to make better decisions. They're much more reasonable. And the inferences that they make from that information.

is much more rational. And there's tons of cognitive psychology work that supports that conclusion.

Srini Rao 

Yeah. Wow. I feel like we could talk about this for like five hours. Like you said, this is a pretty deep rabbit hole. So I want to finish with my final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

John Petrocelli

Something that makes someone unmistakable. How do you define unmistakable?

Srini Rao 

So, you know, well, if you write a book called Unmistakable, as I've said before, you have to define it. And to me, it's the thing that you can do that's so distinctive that nobody else could have done it but you.

John Petrocelli

Well, I'm not gonna bullshit you on that, Srini. I'd honestly have to think about that a little bit more and sort of the boundaries of that. So I think I'm gonna... Yeah.

Srini Rao

That's fair given the subject that we've talked about. You know what, you're the first guest to ever take a pass on the question and given the subject matter, I have no problem with that. I, like I said, I think this has been absolutely amazing. Yours was one of my favorite books that I've read this year. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything that you're up to?

John Petrocelli

Well, I'm easy to find on Twitter at John V. Petro. And any time you find me easily at Wake Forest University Psychology on the web, contact me there. My email's there if you have questions. And usually open to questions from anyone. So.

Srini Rao 

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.