A new study validates a scale of corporate BS receptivity and finds that high scores correlate with bad decisions.
Employees who found corporate gibberish most impressive also performed worst on work-related decision-making.Source: Karola G / Pexels A researcher at Cornell, Shane Littrell, has done what many frustrated employees wanted to do for years: built a generator of pure corporate gibberish—you know, pearls like"actualize a renewed level of swim-lane credentialing on a vertical landscape.
" Then heMore generally, BS is communication that obscures the truth with impressive-sounding nonsense. The study defined “corporate BS” as a"semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way."The researcher built a corporate BS generator by stripping real Fortune 500 executive quotes down to their grammatical skeleton and randomly swapping in buzzwords from annual reports and industry publications. The result: sentences that are syntactically coherent and semantically empty, like a power suit with no one inside. The resulting gibberish quotes were mixed withfrom real CEOs and other company heads, and more than a thousand employed adults in four studies evaluated each statement's"business savvy." The fact that several real executive quotes were indistinguishable from the computer-generated nonsense and had to be removed from analysis because participants couldn't tell the difference is either a finding or a resignation letter, depending on where you work. Study 1 helped refine the instrument, the Corporate Bullsh*t Receptivity Scale . Study 2 also measured participants' analytic thinking or"a great deal" of business savvy.Workers who report the highest levels of BS in their organizations are also more likely to produce it themselves. There are two ways to read this. More generously, these people are conforming to an organizational social norm. Less generously, they selected into that environment because it rewards skills they already had. Both explanations can be true for different people. The ability to distinguish gibberish from real communication correlates positively with analytical thinking and fluid intelligence, specifically with actively open-minded thinking and the kind of reasoning that detects when a claim doesn't actually hold up. This leads to the study's most practically radical suggestion: that the CBSR could eventually serve as a supplemental tool in hiring and promotion decisions, a resource-efficient signal of analytic thinking that is harder to game than self-report measures and more contextually relevant than generic ability tests. However, this could only be a supplemental instrument if further validated for selection. Nobody is guaranteed to never fall for impressively packaged BS. The CBRS validation gives us a tool that captures individual differences in susceptibility to a pervasive form of organizational noise; it also helps predict decision-making quality and perceptions of leadership. It does not, of course, give us a complete picture. Future research needs to examine whether BS receptivity might be sensitive to organizational experience or interventions, or whether it remains relatively stable, as the fluid intelligence finding suggests. It needs to look across cultures. And it needs to test whether the CBSR's promise as a selection tool holds up against actual long-term job performance, not just situational judgment scores. But having a validated tool for something most of us have often complained about while relying onThere was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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