If you’ve ever suspected that your most “results-driven,” “performance-focused” coworkers might just be “effectuating” ineffectual and downright diversionary word vomit, a new study out of Cornell offers powerful validation for your “paradigm-shifting” insights.
Based on a battery of tests on over 1,000 office-worker volunteers, a cognitive psychologist with Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences has found a strong link between a person’s positive opinion of corporate bullshit (BS) and the general weakness of their analytical skills. In one key pair of tests, for example, volunteers who were more enthusiastic about corporate BS also performed significantly worse on tests of effective workplace decision-making.
Worse still, the new research implies a feedback loop whereby these dullards may help advance the careers of any given organization’s most incorrigible and insipid BS pontificators.
“Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” Shane Littrell, the study’s lone author and a postdoctoral psychology researcher at Cornell’s Department of Government, explained in a press statement.
Littrell noted that this kind of bullshit is distinct from the types of equally dense, head-scratching verbiage that also tend to exist in a professional setting to help describe complex tasks and ideas: “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies,” he said. “It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
Defining, refining and validating all the bullshit
Let’s unpack how Littrell ideated on his own forward-thinking deliverables—methodologically—as published last month in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
His study consisted of four interrelated tests, incorporating a total of 1,018 participants, designed to construct and confirm the utility of his new Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR). First, BS statements were generated using randomly selected corporate buzzwords and tested for their ability to mimic real-world instances of convoluted but fundamentally empty corporate speech. Participants were then asked to rate each of these statements using a 5-point scale from “no business savvy at all” to (absurdly) “a great deal of business savvy.”
Next, these office-worker participants were asked to rank a variety of actual corporate mission statements, document how “visionary” they believed their bosses to be, and rank a variety of statements that qualified as somewhat stodgy “general corporate speech,” but not total bullshit, as Littrell wrote in his paper. These same participants were then asked to perform survey measures of “fluid intelligence,” puzzles developed by the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR) project—an open-source resource built by researchers at Cambridge, Northwestern University, and their European partners.
In brief, fans of corporate bullshit fared poorly on fluid-intelligence measures, as well as a related metric, actively open-minded thinking (basically, a measure of one’s ability to consider facts that challenge one’s current beliefs).
The final two tests were identical, in an effort to doubly confirm the results. Participants whose receptivity to corporate bullshit had already been effectively categorized along Littrell’s new CBSR scale were then asked to fill out a series of decision-making situational judgment tests (SJT). The tests have seen decades of use and refinement, dating back to at least World War II, and are a common feature of job interview processes at law firms, government agencies, and other (I guess you could say) somewhat intellectually demanding careers. Littrell also sourced his four-item multiple-choice SJTs from ICAR’s approved selection of tests.
“Corporate bullshit receptivity (CBSR) emerged as the only significant predictor (negative) of decision-making performance,” Littrell found. It outpaced general receptivity to corporate speech and all other control variable markers. This shocking data suggests that poor decision-makers love corporate bullshit.
While insights gleaned in this study are revealing, it’s important to note that peer-reviewed literature has criticized SJTs and similar evaluations for bias against lower socioeconomic groups and for favoring women applicants over men. Littrell’s study also relies almost exclusively on self-selected survey respondents, which likewise can introduce biases and errors.
Elevated by a mountain of bullshit
According to Littrell, the cumulative weight of all these tests is the likelihood of a “concerning cycle” common to the worlds where corporate bullshit thrives. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it,” the cognitive psychologist said in the statement.
The problem could be “creating a sort of negative feedback loop,” Littrell said. “Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
Littrell does have sympathy for the people most taken in by this kind of mind-numbing rhetoric, however. Ultimately, he hopes the new research will encourage more calm, reasoned reflection and humility from everyone who is stuck trying to deal with these unending streams of confounding corporate communication.
“Most of us, in the right situation, can get taken in by language that sounds sophisticated but isn’t,” Littrell noted. “That’s why, whether you’re an employee or a consumer, it’s worth slowing down when you run into organizational messaging of any kind—leaders’ statements, public reports, ads—and ask yourself, ‘What, exactly, is the claim? Does it actually make sense?’”
Read the full article here
