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.

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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."