The crisis of meaning

Why pseudo-profundity feels meaningful

May 06, 2025

Despite recently writing about bullshit, I decided I’d not quite exhausted the topic. Apologies in advance.

Everyone wants to find meaning in their actions and the events which surround them; the idea that stuff just happens and there is no deeper meaning can be alarming. As such we are attracted to the profound. The Barnum effect – named after the American circus entertainer P.T. Barnum by the psychologist Paul Meehl in his brilliant essay Wanted – a Good Cookbook1 – is the observation that when we encounter vague, general statements we’re inclined to leap on them and say, “That’s me, that is!” This is perhaps why, despite any confirming evidence, astrology, fortune-telling and other kinds of personality tests are so enduringly popular.

We are natural pattern-seekers. We long to find meaning in our actions and in the events that shape our lives. The idea that things ‘just happen’ without deeper significance is profoundly unsettling. As such, we’re drawn to the appearance of insight, even when it lacks substance. The result is the cultural and intellectual landscape in which pseudo-profundity thrives.

Education, often saturated with emotive ideals and aspirational language, is especially vulnerable to this kind of feel-good nonsense. Philosopher Daniel Dennett coined a related term, the deepity, to describe:

“A proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false; on another, trivially true. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading and the apparent significance from the first, and thinks, ‘Wow!’”

A well-known purveyor of such pseudo-profundity is Deepak Chopra, whose public statements frequently combine scientific-sounding vocabulary with spiritual generalities in a way that feels significant but often lacks clear, testable meaning. Sentences like “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation” or “You are a non-local being in a local body” are archetypal deepities. Pennycook et al. (2015) investigated how people respond to what they called Chopra’s “pseudo-profound bullshit”: grammatically correct, buzzword-heavy statements with no coherent meaning (e.g. “Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty”).

Their findings were striking: many participants could not reliably distinguish Chopra’s tweets from randomly generated pseudo-profound sentences, a telling indication of how rhetorical form can overshadow semantic content. The researchers concluded that people who struggle to detect pseudo-profundity also tend to show lower levels of cognitive reflection, analytic thinking, and verbal intelligence. In other words, our susceptibility to bullshit correlates with how we think, not just what we know.

To demonstrate how this plays out in practice, consider the 2015 Twitter experiment of @Alistair_Forer, a fictional “education leader” account created to test reactions to plausibly meaningless platitudes. It tweeted messages like:

“I don’t want children to think of learning as a row of tick boxes, but more as a woven tapestry. Learning is a thing of beauty!”
“Teaching is like a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us!”

These statements were enthusiastically liked and shared by teachers, despite being deliberately constructed to sound profound without making clear, actionable claims. The experiment mirrored Pennycook’s findings: even highly educated professionals are drawn to messages that feel meaningful but say nothing of substance.

This tendency isn’t confined to Twitter. Substack Notes, marketed as spaces for thoughtful conversation and personal reflection, has become a new frontier for pseudo-profundity. Here, vague aphorisms and self-consciously ‘deep’ observations abound: “Stillness is a kind of motion,” or “We don’t need more answers, we need better questions.” These are modern deepities: sentimentally phrased, lightly philosophical, and largely empty. With aesthetic minimalism and personalised echo chambers, Substack encourages a kind of performative insight. Statements that trade in vibe rather than verifiability and feeling over meaning.

Recent psychological research into bullshit has become something of a growth industry, with studies revealing how receptivity to pseudo-profound statements correlates with a range of cognitive, behavioural, and ideological traits. Individuals more receptive to bullshit tend to overestimate their creativity, show poorer metacognitive accuracy, and are less likely to engage in charitable or prosocial behaviour. Politically, susceptibility appears higher among right-leaning individuals, especially those with neoliberal worldviews, who are more prone to endorse vague or meaningless political slogans. The same cognitive vulnerability extends to belief in alternative medicine, such as the uncritical use of essential oils. Encouragingly, research also shows that bullshit receptivity can be reduced through explanatory reflection. That is, by prompting people to carefully explain the meaning of a statement before accepting it. Another striking finding is that we are more likely to believe pseudo-profound nonsense if it’s attributed to a scientist rather than a spiritual guru, suggesting that source credibility plays a powerful role in the acceptance of nonsense. These findings suggest that bullshit is a cognitive vulnerability, and a cultural symptom worth taking seriously.2

The antidote, according to Dennett, is a commitment to clarity. Ambiguity should be avoided wherever possible, and statements should mean what they say. One effective test for deepities is the use of reductio ad absurdum — reducing a statement to absurdity to see if it still holds. Dennett gives a classic example:

“Love is just a word.”
On one level, this is plainly false — love is an emotion, a bond, an experience. On another level, if we use quotation marks (“love”), the sentence becomes trivially true: “love” is a word. The problem is that the original phrasing deliberately blurs these readings to give the illusion of depth.

This technique is especially helpful when evaluating edu-jargon. Consider statements like “Learning is a journey,” or “Every child matters.” They are emotionally resonant but lack explanatory power. What kind of journey? What does it mean to matter? What concrete implications follow?

Truth doesn’t always sound nice, and much of what sounds nice isn’t true. This is the terrain of truthiness, a term popularised by satirist Stephen Colbert, which refers to the tendency to accept something as true not because of logic or evidence, but because it feels true. Colbert launched the idea as part of his 2010 “Restore Truthiness” campaign, a satirical response to the growing influence of emotional belief over factual reasoning in politics and media. As part of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, Colbert lampooned the way public discourse had become more about the performance of sincerity than the pursuit of truth. Truthiness, as he described it, is what you want to be true, regardless of what the facts say. It thrives on slogans, sentiment, and gut instinct, often bypassing critical thought.

Educational discourse is riddled with slogans that sound profound but collapse under scrutiny. Policy phrases like “future-ready learners” or “high expectations for all” offer broad visions without specifying what knowledge is needed or how it will be supported. Wellness platitudes such as “be the best version of yourself” or “resilience is the new literacy” are subjectively appealing but pedagogically hollow, often shifting responsibility from systems to individuals. In professional development, terms like “lead learner” and “outstanding learning experiences” circulate with little clarity or substance. These statements rely on truthiness and deepity. They might feel meaningful, but too often replace hard thinking with comforting vagueness.

Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language remains a devastating indictment of lazy thinking disguised as moral clarity. He shows how vague, cliché-ridden language masks ideological manipulation and muddled thought. When educators or policymakers traffic in empty slogans (“future-ready learners,” “21st century skills”) they mirror the bureaucratic doublespeak Orwell skewered. His remedy? Precision, clarity, and intellectual honesty. Orwell’s plea to “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around” is a call to arms for everyone who writes.

We need to ask hard questions, demand clarity, and resist the allure of seductive nonsense. If we’re serious about helping children think critically, we must model intellectual rigour ourselves. That means avoiding deepities, resisting the Barnum effect, and staying alert to the warm, fuzzy appeal of pseudo-profound bullshit.

The crisis of meaning

Why pseudo-profundity feels meaningful

Discussion about this post