According to new scientific research anyways …

Facebook, on the whole, is a terrible place. Family, friends and people we’ve known for brief moments in time now have the ability to word vomit at us throughout the day at will. But without a doubt, the most masochistic part of this experience is the dumbass inspirational quotes people post seriously.

We all have that friend on Facebook who seems to make a living sharing soulless motivational quotes, and who shares cleavage-predominate selfie with unrelated advice from Gandhi copy and pasted in bubble handwriting above their right tit.  But thankfully, much to our black heart’s content, a new study has revealed that people who actually get off on this faux-inspirational shit are of lower intelligence than the rest of us happy pessimists.

In the aptly titled paper "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit," Gordon Pennycook and four other researchers assert there's a correlation “between low intelligence and being impressed by seemingly profound quotes,” according the report.

To come to that thrilling conclusion, Pennycook and his team used the online site Sebpearce.com, which randomly generates vague statements of meaningless gobbledygook meant to sound philosophical or inspiring. With a simple click of the ‘Reionize Electrons,’ button at the top of the page, the process begins, leaving readers with thoughtless hollow drivel like: “This life is nothing short of a flowering flow of intergalactic faith.”

Exactly…

In a recent interview with Vice, Pennycook explained the reasoning behind using Sebpearce for the study:

"I came across the website, I just kind of thought about if there was any research on this; I wanted to know if people thought those statements were profound. I often see quotes [on my newsfeed] that are maybe not quite as egregious, but you see a lot of motivational ones … there's quotes and a picture of somebody who obviously did not say the quote—you come across that quite often."

Roughly 300 participants were given various statements created with the "bullshit" generator and were then asked to rate them by their perceived profoundness on a scale ranging from one to five. To divulge the all-important correlation between the inability to decipher mindless garbage from actual thought and individual intelligence, the subjects were subsequently tested on personality and cognitive and abilities.

Individuals who ranked complete bullshit higher on their perceived level of insightfulness “were determined to be lower in intelligence, less likely to engage in reflective thinking, and more likely to hold conspiratorial or paranormal beliefs,” according to Vice.

This just proves what we’ve all known and feared all along: Humans are terrifyingly gullible and dumb.

Praise whatever God you praise for that handy “Unfollow” button …