Workers who fall for ‘corporate bullshit’ may be worse at their jobs, study finds | Business
Have you ever been in a meeting where someone declared that your company was “growth hacking” and “working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue sky thinking” and called it bullshit? Turns out you were right.
A new study from Cornell University published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences finds that workers most excited and impressed by corporate talk may be the least equipped to make effective and practical business decisions, which can leave companies with dysfunctional leaders.
Academically, “bullshit” is broadly defined as “a type of semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleading, impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging,” according to the study.
“Corporate bullshit” is a specific type of bullshit that uses confusing buzzwords and corporate jargon and is ultimately “semantically empty and often confusing,” according to the study. It is often used by management to persuade and impress, sometimes to inflate the perception of the company among workers and investors.
Quick guide
Randomly generated corporate BS statements
To show
“I bring evolution in solution-finding conversations, human capital insights, and bandwidth turnover. My goal is to execute a synergistic capability to determine and analyze a sustainable mobility solution.”
“I have a winning tradition of leveraging benchmarks, facilitating key learnings, and driving scalability. My goal is to realize business alignment and thought leadership everywhere.”
“My main goal is to cover all the bases of the focal skills by pursuing, with the team I am part of, the certification of the sustainable mobility solution of our global partner.”
“I believe that being part of a high-performing, cradle-to-grave, vertically focused team is what drives growth “ah-ha!” moments “from the top of the mountain.”
“I am an innovation-driven business professional with proactive accreditation experience and focal skills across a broad online and physical lane platform. »
“I am passionate about being part of a scalable vision keeper that synergizes an ecosystem of inspiration.”
“I drive my core values to help best-in-class organizations implement ambitious value propositions, from start to finish, to world leaders and meaning seekers. »
“As a global leader rooted in a mission to hack growth and return to the human spirit, I have always aspired to capture exponential connections, imagining organizational stakeholders and thought leaders, regardless of the business I am optimizing for.
“There’s a lot of useful stuff about the way people in a certain company talk to each other. But it becomes problematic when it devolves into nonsense used for deceptive purposes,” said Shane Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher and cognitive psychologist at Cornell University who authored the study. “It’s the people who can’t tell the difference who 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 accreditation from cradle to grave,” creating “a hyper-connected, frictionless, impact-minded global enterprise” while “putting our friends under the tent with our best practices, we will pressure test a renewed level of adaptive consistency.”
After mixing the quotes created by the generator with actual quotes from Fortune 500 company executives, Littrell asked 1,000 office workers to rate the “business sense” of each statement.
In one study, Littrell presented each participant with different scenarios they would face in a workplace and asked them what decisions they would make in those scenarios.
When it came to measuring actual influence on the job, those who fell for corporate bullshit showed lower scores on analytical thinking, reflection, and fluid intelligence.
Littrell used the results of 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 bullshit receptivity in organizations.
“The people who are most sensitive to corporate bullshit tend to consistently choose the worst solutions to these problems,” Littrell said.
He cited an example from 2009, when Pepsi’s rebranding attempt was ridiculed after the leak of a 27-page document that opened with “by investing in our brand history and philosophy, we can create a new trajectory forward” — kicking off what was a $1.5 million attempt to slightly change the company’s logo. He also highlighted Elizabeth Holmes and her ability to use corporate bullshit to seduce and ultimately defraud investors.
Being seduced by bullshit isn’t so bad. In another study, those who were sensitive to company bullshit viewed their superiors as more charismatic and “visionary,” and were more likely to be inspired by their company’s mission statement and experience job satisfaction.
Littrell noted that the workers who participated in the study all came from highly educated backgrounds in human resources, accounting, marketing and finance, had bachelor’s degrees and even doctorates, showing that the results go beyond simply assessing the intelligence of the study participants.
“It’s not something that only affects less intelligent people,” he concluded. “Anyone can fall for bullshit, and we all, depending on the situation, fall for bullshit when it is somehow packaged to appeal to our biases.”
