Why do profound-sounding sentences persuade so many people?
Short answer: because the brain processes fluency and an air of gravity before it checks content. When a sentence uses abstract words, an even rhythm, and broad associations, readers tend to assume it means something, even when the sentence says nothing concrete. Gordon Pennycook and colleagues tested this experimentally and published in 2015 in the journal Judgment and Decision Making1.
What did the 2015 study do and find?
Pennycook's team created sentences by randomly combining profound-sounding words into a grammatically valid structure with no clear meaning, for example the English sentence "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena". They asked participants to rate how profound those sentences were, then compared those ratings with analytic thinking scores measured by reasoning problems.
Main result: participants tended to rate those meaningless sentences highly, and higher ratings correlated negatively with analytic thinking scores. In other words, the less people used analytic reasoning, the more likely they were to find meaningless sentences profound.
The authors argued that people with better analytic thinking tend to examine the concrete meaning of a sentence, and if they find none, they treat that as a flaw of the sentence rather than of themselves. People leaning on intuition react to first impressions, and those impressions are inflated by the sentence's vagueness.
What is the acceptance scale and what are the sample sentences?
In the study, participants rated each sentence by how profound they found it. The scale measures acceptance, meaning the degree to which people accept profound-sounding sentences with no content. The table below summarizes what the sources say and what this article adds as illustration.
| Sentence type | Example | Source or illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Randomly combined profound-sounding words | "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" | Sample sentence in the 2015 study |
| Sentence with concrete content | A sentence describing a verifiable event | Used in the study for comparison |
| Vietnamese illustration | "Năng lượng của vũ trụ đang rung động theo tần số riêng của bạn" | Illustration by Nhat Nguyet, not a sentence from the study |
| Vietnamese illustration | "Vũ trụ luôn gửi tín hiệu khi bạn sẵn sàng" | Illustration by Nhat Nguyet, not a sentence from the study |
The Vietnamese sentences in the table are examples created by this article to illustrate the type of sentence under discussion, not sentences taken from the research. No study in Vietnamese has yet tested acceptance of this sentence type, so this is where evidence is still lacking.
How does analytic thinking relate to everyday life?
Pennycook and colleagues published in 2015 in Current Directions in Psychological Science a review on the everyday consequences of differences in analytic thinking. This paper shows that the tendency to think analytically appears not only in the lab but also links to how people evaluate information, beliefs, and daily decisions.
The research also suggests that analytic thinking can be used to reinforce existing beliefs, not only to reject them. So it would be too simple to conclude that high analytic thinkers are always right and low analytic thinkers are always wrong.
What role does the belief that 'beliefs should change with evidence' play?
In 2020, Pennycook and colleagues published in Judgment and Decision Making a study on the belief that beliefs and opinions should change when new evidence appears. The authors called this tendency active open-minded thinking about evidence, abbreviated AOT-E.
Results showed that people with high AOT-E scores tended to believe less in paranormal, conspiratorial, and religious claims, and held more favorable attitudes toward science. However, the relationship was not entirely uniform: some scale items correlated negligibly or in the opposite direction.
The study also noted that analytic thinking can be used to justify existing beliefs, not only to reconsider them. So having high analytic thinking does not automatically guarantee that a person will accept new evidence.
Numerology and 'vibration': where do they come from?
L. Dow Balliett, an American author of the early 20th century, wrote The Philosophy of Numbers: Their Tone and Colors, published in 1908, presenting the idea that numbers have tone and color, and that all things vibrate at their own rhythms. She held that colors and sounds are tied to numbers, and that people have their own "vibration" according to birth date and name.
In 1917, Balliett published How to Attain Success Through the Strength of Vibration: A System of Numbers as Taught by Pythagoras, in which she assigned numbers to names and birth dates to interpret personality, career, marriage, and health. She also wrote about colors, gemstones, scents, and flowers corresponding to each number.
It must be stated clearly: these books are the source texts of a belief system; they only show what that system says, not that what it says is true. They also show that the "vibration" language in modern numerology originated in the early 20th century, not from Pythagoras as the book title suggests. Pythagoras lived around the 6th century BCE, and no text of his presents a system of numbers based on name and birth date as Balliett described.
Why do 'vibration' and 'energy' language remain appealing?
Many people use words like "energy", "vibration", "frequency", "the universe sends signals" in daily life to talk about emotions, relationships, or personal direction. These words feel familiar because they appear in books, lectures, and social media, and they suggest a deep order behind things.
The mechanism that makes them sound profound is that they do not force the listener to check anything concrete. A sentence like "your energy is attracting the right people" can neither be confirmed nor refuted by a clear measurement. That vagueness makes the sentence hard to refute, and because it is hard to refute, it is easily retained as something that seems true.
Two things must be distinguished. First, whether the sentence has verifiable content. Second, whether the speaker or listener believes it. This article only discusses the first: does the sentence say anything concrete? The article does not label the writer or the reader.
How can you recognize a sentence that only sounds profound but says nothing?
You can self-check with the following five questions. This is a tool proposed by this article, based on how the 2015 study distinguished meaningful from meaningless sentences.
- Can this sentence be false? If it cannot be false, it also cannot be true in a verifiable sense.
- If you replace the key word with another of the same type, does the sentence change meaning? If not, the key word may only be creating atmosphere.
- What does this sentence tell me I can do differently tomorrow?
- If someone said the opposite, would I have any way to adjudicate?
- Do I find this sentence profound because it matches what I already believed, or because it offers new information?
These questions are not meant to reject personal experience. The feeling of being comforted, guided, or connected is real, and it can influence behavior for the better. What needs to be separated is this: the effect comes from the belief and the accompanying behavior, not from evidence that the sentence correctly describes a law of the universe. When belief changes behavior and behavior changes outcomes, we can acknowledge that effect without calling it evidence for the mechanism stated in the sentence.
Limitations of the available evidence
The studies above were conducted mainly with English-speaking participants in North America, in laboratory and online survey settings. No published study on Vietnamese people has tested acceptance of pseudo-profound statements, so results cannot be extrapolated to Vietnamese people without corresponding data.
In addition, the 2015 study focused on one specific sentence type: randomly combined profound-sounding words. The authors themselves noted that many other forms of vague sentences remain untested, and results should not be extended to all types of vague language.
Conclusion
There is a measurable mechanism that makes profound-sounding but empty sentences persuasive to many people. This mechanism relates to how the brain processes fluency and an air of gravity before checking content, and it correlates with analytic thinking levels. Recognizing this mechanism does not require labeling the speaker or the listener. It only requires a habit: ask whether the sentence can be false, and if it can, what would show that.
