Bullshitting Frequency Test (BFS)

How much of what you say could survive a follow-up question?

Bullshitting got a serious philosophical treatment in Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit: unlike lying, it has no use for the truth at all. A liar knows the truth and hides it; a bullshitter skips the truth entirely — talk that sounds reasonable but carries no real substance, deployed to shape impressions and keep social situations smooth.

Littrell, Risko and Fugelsang (2021) built a scale to measure this tendency at the University of Waterloo. Four studies and roughly 1,600 participants went into the development: a 45-item pool was trimmed to 12, and factor analysis consistently recovered two dimensions — persuasive (exaggerating to impress or convince) and evasive (talking around things to avoid trouble, awkwardness, or hurting someone). The two factors correlate but stay distinguishable, with clear discriminant validity against the Lying in Everyday Situations scale (LiES).

Reading your results

• High persuasive: your talk often serves impression management — sounding smarter, more interesting, better informed. It works in the moment; over time, people quietly start discounting you.
• High evasive: when honesty is expensive, circling is the default. It spares the moment's awkwardness at the cost of candor in the relationship.
• High on both: bullshitting is nearly your default mode of communication. Worth asking what it's protecting.
• Low on both: you rarely dress up the truth, whether for image or for convenience.

In validation studies, bullshitting frequency correlated negatively with cognitive ability, open-minded cognition, and self-regard, and positively with Machiavellianism and overclaiming — it clusters in people who don't sweat accuracy. It's also independent of lying: you can bullshit often while lying rarely, or the reverse.

This test is for education and self-exploration only; it is not a diagnostic instrument.