Last week, The Economist reported some interesting research in an article titled, “Who are the biggest bullshitters?“. The ‘who’ refers to nationality. I made my logical guess, then read on. Imagine my surprise to see that Canadians topped the list of the world’s biggest bullshitters! As the Millennials say, ‘Wait—what?’.

Here are the key findings as reported by The Economist:

  1. North Americans are the world’s biggest bullshitters. When you look at the first graphic, you see that Canadians top Americans by 20% on average bullshit score.
  2.  Boys bullshit more than girls.
  3. The rich bullshit more than the poor.
  4. Immigrants bullshit more than natives.
  5. Bullshitters tend to over-estimate their own knowledge and rate themselves highly when gauging their personal popularity, perseverance on academic tasks and problem-solving ability.

Findings 2 to 5 make sense to me, with the exception of #4. I’m good with finding 1a. But 1b is a massive disruption in the universal order of things that demands a deeper look. So I ran this research through the Coyote Research Protocol we developed a while back (see SHOPPING BETTER THAN SEX? RESEARCH PROVES IT. Here goes:

  1.  Sponsor Bias

    This wasn’t new primary research. It was a different look at previous survey data collected for a different purpose. The original data was created by PISA, OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. The author of the study in question is IZA Institute of Labor Economics, the world’s largest network of economists.[1] It is funded by Deutsche Post Foundation (founded by Germany’s Deutsche Post DHL, the world’s largest logistics company). Can’t see any sponsor bias here.

  2. Methodology

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    The Trump Effect
    By the definition here, Donald Trump is an accomplished bullshitter. He’s also a liar—a whole different level of untruthfulness according to the contextual literature.
    The PISA research closes with the ominous statement, “Bullshitting is a widely recognised social ‘skill’ which is likely to have an impact upon a person’s life.” Donald Trump is the highest-profile living proof possible, if you understand who he really is.

    The underlying size sample is huge—40,000 15-year-old students. This study focused on the data nine countries where English is the official and/or predominant language.[2] Also, the survey data was from 2012, so there is no Trump Effect at work here. There is statistical and methodological soundness.

  3. Deductive Reasoning

    The authors of this study define bullshitters based on the contextual literature—”individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill.” [3] In the PISA study, the opportunity to bullshit had to be created. 15-year-old students were shown 16 math terms and asked which terms they ‘had knowledge of’. Three of those 16 terms were made up. Students who professed knowledge of the bogus math terms were thereafter defined as bullshitters. So it’s wrong to deduce the people of Canada and the US are the world’s biggest bullshitters without applying the 15-year-old qualifier.

    It’s possible the bogus math terms were not perfect for the purpose. They were: proper number, subjunctive scaling and declarative fraction. Proper is used in math terminology, as in proper fraction. Proper number could be presumed to be, or mistaken as, another version of whole number, natural number or prime number. The same argument can’t be made for the other two bogus terms, and we can’t know how what effect the proper number term had on bullshit index totals.

    It is also shaky deductive reasoning to say that bullshitting on math knowledge in a two-hour math, science and literacy achievement test necessarily means the student bullshits on other more important topics.

Summary

Weakness in the deductive reasoning behind The Economist’s reporting of IZA’s research on PISA’s original survey data (phew!) does not explain why 15-year-old Canadians are more likely than Americans to bullshit about their math knowledge. So my question is, “When did Canadian teens start suffering from more exceptionalism than their American counterparts?” Maybe I’m naïve to believe there is, or ever was, a difference.

Or maybe the answer to our reported America-trumping level of bullshitting is actually in the research. At the time of the PISA survey, Canada’s immigrant proportion of total population was 30% higher than America’s [4] and the vast majority of our recent immigrants are from non-Anglophone countries. Key finding #4 above made no sense to me until I learned IZA restricted their data set to Anglophone countries because students who didn’t learn math in English would have difficulty distinguishing between the real and made-up math terms that create the opportunity to bullshit. Key finding #4 shows which way that bias goes. Curiously, America was the only country where there wasn’t a significant difference in bullshitting based on birthplace.

The Marketing Lesson

We probably said it best nine years ago:

Research results are rarely wrong, but we need to make sure we asked the right questions of the right people and made the right deductions from the results.

Notes and references:
  1. John Jerrim, Phil Parker & Nikki Shure, “Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know About Their Lives?”, IZA Discussion Paper No. 12282, April, 2018.
  2. Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, USA and Wales.
  3. Based on various works by American philosopher and educator Harry Frankfurt.
  4. IZA defines immigrants as students who were not born in the country they are being tested in. Natives are the opposite. Immigrant percentages of population are from National Household Surveys in Canada (2011) and USA (2015).