Repetition can make claims feel truer even when no new evidence appears.

Bullsh*t may persuade better than lying because truth-indifference is harder to detect.

Good-enough approximations stay adaptive only while they remain open to correction.

Responding well means naming the tactic without feeding the outrage that spreads it.

We know the feeling before words present themselves, as our BS detectors are visceral. Someone says something—in a meeting, in a comment thread—and you just know. It may not be a lie; a lie would at least offer something to disprove. This is slipperier. You cannot tell whether the person believes it, means it, or knows what he is doing. I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose. Not-knowing is the fulcrum, more particularly knowing there is a not-knowing brewing. In the meantime, BS is working on less conscious levels, already.

Why Bullsh*t Can Beat Lying

New research puts flesh on the bones. Petrocelli and colleagues asked participants to judge claims attributed to an ordinary person, a liar, or a bullsh*tter. The bullsh*tter was treated no worse than the ordinary person and as more believable than the liar. Repeated claims attributed to the bullsh*tter also produced a pronounced illusory-truth effect: familiarity made them feel more true, even when repetition added no evidence (Petrocelli et al., 2026).

That result sits inside a much larger literature. A recent meta-analysis of 182 studies, including more than 31,000 participants, confirmed that repetition produces a small but robust increase in perceived truth (Ye et al., 2026). We are not simply evaluating content. We are also registering ease, familiarity, confidence, and the social presentation of the person speaking.

In On Bullsh*t, Frankfurt distinguished lying from bullsh*t by the speaker's relationship to truth (Frankfurt, 2005). A liar must track reality closely enough to conceal it. A bullsh*tter need not: The statement may be true, false, mixed, or impossible to evaluate. What has dropped........

© Psychology Today