Ever get annoyed by people on social media who share 'profound' quotes, or use meaningless, intelligent-sounding soundbites in arguments? 
 
 A new study has shown that there is a link between these people and low intelligence. 
 
 It found that those who are receptive to pseudo-profound, intellectual-sounding 'bulls***' are less intelligent, less reflective, and more likely to be believe in conspiracy theories, the paranormal and alternative medicine. 
 
 PhD candidate Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, published a study entitled 'On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bulls***'. 
 
 It mentions the word 'bulls***' over 200 times. 
 
 They tested hundreds of people to find the link between being impressed by 'bulls***' quotes and low intelligence. 
 
 Examples of 'bulls***' were given, as it is a hard term to define. 
 
 Essentially, it means grand-sounding statements which mean nothing - many people post such things on Instagram. 
 
 An example was: "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty." 
 
 The paper says: "Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure." 
 
 "Bulls***, in contrast to mere nonsense, is something that implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth." 
 
 Pennycook used a website that would randomly generate these pseudo-profound sentences from a string of words. 
 
 This website is active, and serves up wise-sounding aphorisms like "This life is nothing short of an unveiling quantum leap of mythic rejuvenation" and "We are at a crossroads of transformation and desire" at the click of a button. 
 
 Almost 300 test subjects were asked to rate the profundity of these sentences on a scale of one to five. 
 
 They were asked to differentiate between philosophy quotes, "bulls***", and mundane sentences. 
 
 Most recognised the mundane as mundane, but rated the made-up quotes on similar levels of profoundity to tweets posted by Deepak Chopra, a writer. 
 
 OK ? ?? A photo posted by @24january_ on Dec 3, 2015 at 4:56am PST 
 
 As well as this. he researchers looked into a number of other personality traits, examining how the participants think about themselves and the world around them. 
 
 The paper said that those who were more receptive to the bulls*** statements and who tended to rate them higher were "less reflective, lower in cognitive ability(i.e verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy,) and are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation." 
 
 It also said they were more likely to "hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine." 
 
 As they say, "our findings are consistent with the idea that the tendency to rate vague, meaningless statements as profound is a legitimate psychological phenomenon that is consistently related to at least some variables of theoretical interest." ||||| Nobel winning scientists gather for 26th straight year to award the most absurd, strange and curious research of the year 
 
 Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the year. 
 
 2015 Ig Nobel prizes: dinosaur-like chickens and bee-stings to the penis Read more 
 
 The ceremony, now in its 26th year, delivered a $10tn Zimbabwean bill (about 40 cents in US money) to winners. Those who traveled to Boston received their prizes from Nobel laureates: chemist Dudley Herschbach, economist Eric Maskin, Dr Rich Roberts and physicist Roy Glauber. 
 
 As in past years, the tone of the awards show vacillated from gleeful absurdism to satire to genuine wonder at the lengths to which scientists will let their curiosity lead them. 
 
 Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik, for instance, wanted to know the toll that trousers might take on male rats. He made murine trousers – covering the animals’ hind legs with a hole for the tail – in various cloths: 100% polyester, 50/50% polyester/cotton, all cotton and all wool. 
 
 Rats that wore polyester showed “significantly lower” rates of sexual activity, Shafik found, perhaps because of the electrostatic charges created by the material. Cotton- and wool-wearing rats were relatively normal. 
 
 Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes and Shelagh Ferguson, a team from New Zealand and the UK, won the prize in economics for a study of the personalities of rocks. The trio studied a concept called “brand personality”, or the “set of human characteristics associated with the brand” – for example wholesomeness, youth, intelligence and sophistication – by putting pictures of rocks in front of 225 Kiwi students. 
 
 The students then decided which of 42 traits, 15 facets and five factors to apply to the rocks in question. One, Rock G, was variously described as “a big New York type businessman, rich, smooth, maybe a little shady” and “carries a black brief case, slick hair, quick thinker and quicker talker. Not a good dude though.” 
 
 Rock I was described by one student as “a gypsy or a traveller, a hippie” and by another as “liberal, attractive and female, I saw a young person, maybe mid-30s, who was very attractive when she was younger/possibly a model. Has her own way of thinking, with a somewhat grounded confidence, enjoys organic food.” 
 
 The third rock, Rock H, was called “modest”, “farm mechanic” and “down-to-earth”. 
 
 
 
 The biology award went to two Britons: Thomas Thwaites, who created prosthetic limbs that let him move like and among goats, and Charles Foster, who has tried to live as a badger, an otter, a fox and a stag. 
 
 As a badger, Foster ate worms, dug a hillside den and tried to sniff out voles. Living as an urban fox, he scavenged through trash and slept in gardens. As a goat, Thwaites infiltrated a herd in the Swiss Alps and spent three days eating grass, bleating and stumbling over rocks. 
 
 Foster and Thwaites wrote books about their experiments, respectively Being a Beast and GoatMan. 
 
 A coalition from the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands won the psychology award, for asking 1,000 liars how often they had lied over the course of their life, and rating how well they lied. 
 
 People gradually lied more as they aged out of childhood, the study found, peaking during adolescence, and as adults lied on average twice a day. Lying decreased with age, although some prolific liars may have skewed results. The researchers also acknowledged that the liars might have been lying to them all along. 
 
 The peace prize went to a gang of philosophers from Canada and the US who published a paper titled On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit. 
 
 The researchers studied how people understand gibberish that has been framed as if it means something, by creating random but grammatical sentences of buzzwords that sounded like vaguely meditative posters meant to inspire office drones or distract dental patients from the drill. Examples included “wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” and “hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty”. 
 
 “There is little question that bullshit is a real and consequential phenomenon,” the scientists wrote, warning that given advances in communication, “bullshit may be more pervasive than ever before”. 
 
 They noted, for example, that Dr Deepak Chopra, an author and MD followed by millions on Twitter, once wrote: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” 
 
 Their mission: “Are people able to detect blatant bullshit? Who is most likely to fall prey to bullshit and why?” 
 
 The philosophers asked 280 students at the University of Waterloo to rate the “profoundness” of real and invented statements on a scale of one to five, and to search for meaning in those statements. Those students most “receptive to bullshit”, they found, were “less reflective, lower in cognitive ability” and more likely “to hold religious and paranormal beliefs”. 
 
 The researchers admitted their study had limitations, writing: “Although this manuscript may not be truly profound, it is indeed meaningful.” 
 
 A medicine prize was given to German scientists who found that if you have an itch on your left side, you can look into a mirror and scratch your right to relieve it. A perception prize was handed to two Japanese researchers who tried to learn whether bending over and looking at things between your legs changes how things appear. 
 
 Physics awards were given to researchers from Hungary, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, who found that white horses attract fewer horseflies and that dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones. The award for literature went to a Swedish author, Fredrik Sjoberg, who wrote a trilogy about collecting flies. 
 
 The most surprising winner was for chemistry: the automaker Volkswagen, caught for violating US emissions law, was granted a nearly worthless Zimbabwean bill to help pay for its massive legal costs. The Ig Nobel committee said the award was “for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electro-mechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested”. ||||| "And the chemistry prize goes to … Volkswagen!" The announcement, made last night in a packed hall at Harvard University, was unlikely to please the car company, however. That’s because it was awarded "for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested," explained Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research . 
 
 This isn't your typical scientific gig. In a room packed with Nobel laureates, opera singers, and whizzing paper airplanes, this could only be one event: the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. This marks the 26th year of the contest that celebrates scientific studies that "make you laugh, and then think." 
 
 Just like the $10 trillion prize accepted on stage by the winning scientists—it is a Zimbabwean banknote with little value as a result of hyperinflation—many of this year's studies focused on perception and deception. 
 
 Take for example the Ig Nobel Prize–winning study of itches by a team of neurologists and psychologists at the University of Lübeck in Germany, published in PLOS ONE in 2013. The researchers injected a chemical under the skin of people's arms to cause a mild itch. The volunteers were then asked to scratch one of their arms while looking at themselves in a mirror. The catch was that the mirror and a real-time video camera controlled which arm appeared to be scratched. Sometimes the participants scratched the truly itchy arm but it looked like their nonitchy arm was being scratched, and vice versa. And surprisingly, the subjects reported significant itch relief even when they scratched the wrong arm—as long as it looked like the itchy arm was getting scratched. 
 
 Misperception in the nonhuman world also got the Ig Nobel nod. Two studies of confused animals led by Gábor Horváth, a biophysicist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, garnered a joint prize. The first was a study of dragonflies published in 2007 in Freshwater Biology . The mystery was why dragonflies were spending so much time on polished black gravestones in Hungarian cemeteries where the insects' prey were nowhere to be found. The females were even depositing their eggs on the stone surface where they had no chance of surviving. The answer? Polarized light. The insects detect their watery homes by looking for the polarized light that shimmers on its surface. It turns out that the black gravestones reflect similar polarized light, turning them into a literal graveyard for dragonflies. 
 
 Then Horváth turned to the mystery of horse flies. Why do they prefer to bite dark horses over white ones? In a study published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B , he discovered the answer: Polarized light strikes again. Horses with pure white fur are much prized by breeders and suffer a range of maladies—including sunburn—but they have a built-in advantage. White horse fur does not reflect the characteristic polarized light that the blood-sucking insects use to find their lunch. 
 
 But perhaps the ultimate exploration of animal confusion goes to Charles Foster and Thomas Thwaites. Foster is an ethicist and veterinarian based in Oxford, U.K.; Thwaites is a technologist based in London, and both of them have spent significant amounts of time pretending to not be humans. Foster, who wanted to better understand the nonhuman "worldview," lived for days at a time as a badger, sleeping all day and roaming the forest all night on his hands and knees hunting for earthworms to eat. The animal of choice for Thwaites was an elephant, but he deemed it too dangerous and difficult of a transformation, so he settled on being a goat. 
 
 This required the design of prosthetic limbs and intense physical training. He spent days with goats in the Swiss Alps, chewing grass and generally trying to fit in with the herd. What did he learn from his immersive exploration of the goat world? It's crucial to have friends in the intensely hierarchical world of the herd, and Thwaites says he was lucky to have a goat "buddy." All their hard work paid off last night as they accepted their $10 trillion prizes. 
 
 The rest of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes: 
 
 REPRODUCTION PRIZE 
 
 The late Ahmed Shafik of Cairo University, for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for then conducting similar tests with human males. 
 
 ECONOMICS PRIZE 
 
 Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective. 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE 
 
 Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers. 
 
 PEACE PRIZE 
 
 Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit." 
 
 LITERATURE PRIZE 
 
 Fredrik Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead. 
 
 PERCEPTION PRIZE 
 
 Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.
– This has to rank among the best opening statements ever in a study abstract: "Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation." And so researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario set out to study "pseudo-profound bullshit," and who believes it. Reporting in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, the researchers asked subjects to rate quotes that are philosophical, mundane, or simply BS—the latter consisting, in their words, of "seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous"—on a profundity scale. The team also tested participants' cognitive and reasoning ability. The researchers found that those who are "more receptive" to BS have lower "verbal and fluid intelligence" and are more likely to believe in the paranormal, conspiracy theories, and alternative medicine. For actual examples of readily propagated BS, Forbes reports PhD candidate Gordon Pennycook and his team turned to the Twitter feed of Deepak Chopra, highlighting tweets such as "Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation." The Telegraph reports the researchers also used this website, which composes made-up pseudo-profound statements like this one: "Growth is the richness of life, and of us." The researchers found that participants assigned the website-generated BS and Chopra's tweets similar profoundness ratings. As for who was good at sniffing out BS, Forbes reports it was those who tend to "have an analytic cognitive style and be skeptical about paranormal phenomena." Chopra's response to it all? He tweeted, "I thank the authors for the study. Their # bullshit is getting me more speaking engagements & new book offers." (Read about another unusual study: Scientists have decided there are 4 kinds of drunks.)