Least surprising study ever: rich boys are full of BS

Interesting study (.pdf format). They asked 15-year-old boys and girls in the English-speaking nations whether they were knowledgeable about non-existent subjects.

As a rule, girls were more likely to admit that they knew nothing about bogus subjects like “subjunctive scaling,” while boys often claimed expertise. In terms of class differentiation, poor kids were honest in admitting they knew nothing of such imaginary subjects as “declarative fractions,” but the richer the respondent, the more they were likely to bullshit.

Those findings didn’t surprise me, but some things did:

* The USA did NOT finish first in total bullshit. The upset winner was Canada.

* The USA had the least gender gap (England had the most) and the least class gap (Scotland had the most). While Americans finished very high in bullshit, it was distributed quite evenly among genders and classes.

Basically all Americans are full of it.

Conversely, the Scots finished very low in total bullshit, but evidenced large gaps by class and gender. In other words, poor Scots girls are the straightest shooters on the planet, or at least on the English-speaking portion of it.

————-

The study also showed that those who rated themselves very high on questions like “I am quick to understand things” – the sort of questions that often appear on pre-employment questionnaires – also tended to score very high on bullshit.

I suppose it’s logical that some confidence is bullshit. I remember reading a more specific study many years ago that measured people’s belief in their ability to multi-task, and contrasted it to their actual tested ability. People who think they are good at it are actually no better than anyone else. (This is a bit misleading because the study also showed that nobody is really good at multi-tasking, so it was inevitable that they would conclude that anyone who claims to be is bullshitting. Trying to do two things at once is almost never comparable in efficiency to doing them one at a time.)