Ever sat in a meeting where someone declares that your company is “growth-hacking” and “working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking” and called bullshit? Turns out you were right.
A new study out of Cornell University published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found workers most excited and impressed by corporate speak may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions, and it can leave companies with dysfunctional leaders.
Academically, “bullshit” is broadly defined as “a type of semantically, logically or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative or otherwise engaging”, according to the study.
“Corporate bullshit” is a specific type of bullshit that uses puzzling corporate buzzwords and jargon and is ultimately “semantically empty and often confusing”, according to the research. It is often used by management to persuade and impress, sometimes to inflate perceptions of the company to workers and investors.
Quick Guide
Randomly generated corporate BS statements
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“I bring an evolution of solutioning conversations, ideating human capital, and pivoting bandwidth. My goal is to execute synergistic ability to ascertain and analyze a sustainable mobility solution.”
“I have a winning tradition of harnessing benchmarks, facilitating key learnings, and potentiating scalability. My goal is to concretize business-anywhere alignment and thought leadership.”
“My primary goal is to cover all the bases of focal competencies by going forward with whatever team I’m on in credentialing the sustainable mobility solution of our global partner.”
“I believe that being a part of a high-performing, cradle-to-grave, and verticality-focused team is what growth hacks “ah-ha! moments” from the top of the mountain.”
“I am an innovation-based business professional with a background in proactive credentialing and focal competencies across a broad platform of online and brick-and-mortar swim lanes.”
“I’m passionate about being part of a scalable vision custodian that synergizes an ecosystem of inspiration.”
“I cheerlead my core values to help best-in-class organizations leverage ambitious, cradle-to-grave value propositions to global leaders and meaning seekers.”
“As a global leader grounded in a mission to growth-hack and circle back to the human spirit, I have always aspired to grasp exponential connections, ideating on organizational players and thought leaders no matter what company I optimize for.”
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“There’s a lot of useful things about the way people in a certain company speak to each other. But it becomes problematic when that turns into nonsense that’s used for misleading purposes,” Shane Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher and cognitive psychologist at Cornell University who authored the study, said. “It’s the people that can’t tell the difference that seem to have the most problems.”
To test the impact of corporate bullshit on workers, Littrell developed a “corporate bullshit generator” that generates statements such as “we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing”, creating “a hyper-connected, frictionless, and impact-minded global enterprise” all while “getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence”.
After mixing quotes created by the generator with real quotes from Fortune 500 company leaders, Littrell asked 1,000 office workers to rate each statement’s “business savvy”.
In one study, Littrell presented each participant with different scenarios they would encounter in a workplace and asked them which decisions they would make in those scenarios.
When it came to measuring actual influence on the job, those who fell for corporate bullshit displayed lower scores on analytical thinking, reflection and fluid intelligence.
Littrell used results from the four studies to construct and develop the “Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale”, a tool for researchers and practitioners to examine the causes and consequences of receptivity to bullshit in organizations.
“The people that are the most susceptible to the corporate bullshit tended to choose the worst solutions to those problems on a consistent basis,” Littrell said.
He cited an example from 2009, when Pepsi’s rebrand attempt was ridiculed after the leak of a 27-page document that opened with “by investing in our history and brand ethos we can create a new trajectory forwards” – kicking off what was a $1.5m attempt to slightly modify the company’s logo. He also pointed to Elizabeth Holmes and her ability to use corporate bullshit to woo and ultimately defraud investors.
Being wowed by bullshit isn’t all bad. In another study, those who were susceptible to corporate bullshit rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary”, and were more likely to be inspired by their company’s mission statement and to experience job satisfaction.
Littrell noted the workers who participated in the study all came from highly educated backgrounds in HR, accounting, marketing and finance, had bachelor’s degrees and even PhDs, which shows the findings go beyond simply assessing the intelligence of the study participants.
“This isn’t something that only affects people who are less intelligent,” he concluded. “Anybody can fall for bullshit, and we all, depending on the situation, fall for bullshit when it is kind of packaged up to appeal to our biases.”
