Workers who fall for corporate buzzwords make worse decisions, Cornell study finds

"We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing." That sentence was generated by a computer. It means nothing. But in a study of more than 1,000 office workers, some rated it as genuinely savvy business communication -- and those workers turned out to be measurably worse at making practical decisions.

Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, built what he calls a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR) and used it across four studies to measure how susceptible individual workers are to impressive-sounding but semantically empty organizational rhetoric. The results, published in Personality and Individual Differences, describe a pattern he calls a "concerning cycle."

Building a BS generator

To test receptivity, Littrell first needed a reliable supply of corporate nonsense. He built a generator that produces grammatically correct, superficially impressive, and completely meaningless sentences -- things like "By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence."

He then mixed these fabricated statements with real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders and asked workers to rate the "business savvy" of each one. The ratings became the basis of the CBSR, which was validated across four studies as a statistically reliable measure of individual differences in receptivity to corporate jargon.

The BS-decision-making connection

Workers who scored high on the CBSR -- meaning they rated the computer-generated nonsense as genuinely insightful -- also displayed lower scores on established tests of analytic thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. More directly relevant to workplace performance, they scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

They also rated their supervisors as more charismatic and "visionary." The workers most excited by bold, abstract leadership rhetoric were the least equipped to evaluate whether that rhetoric mapped onto any concrete reality.

"This creates a concerning cycle," Littrell said. "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, creating a sort of negative feedback loop."

Why corporate BS thrives

Littrell draws a distinction between corporate BS and technical jargon. Technical jargon, while sometimes opaque, serves a genuine communicative function -- it gives specialists a shared shorthand for complex concepts. Corporate BS does the opposite: it uses abstraction and buzzwords to obscure rather than clarify meaning.

The workplace, Littrell argues, is structurally hospitable to BS in ways that other environments are not. Corporate jargon is already the norm, ambitious employees can use BS-laden communication to appear more competent, and the consequences for unclear communication are often diffuse and delayed. "The workplace not only rewards but structurally protects it," he said.

He points to real-world examples where corporate language caused measurable damage. A widely discussed 2014 memo from a Microsoft executive used 10 paragraphs of jargon before revealing, in paragraph 11, that 12,500 employees were losing their jobs. The press dubbed it the worst email ever written.

A red flag, not a diagnosis

The CBSR measures a tendency, not a fixed trait. Littrell notes that most people, in the right context, can be taken in by language that sounds sophisticated but carries no substance. The scale is also limited by its reliance on generated sentences and Fortune 500 quotes -- real corporate environments involve ongoing relationships, institutional knowledge, and social dynamics that a survey cannot fully replicate.

His practical advice is simple: "Whether you're an employee or a consumer, it's worth slowing down when you run into organizational messaging of any kind and ask yourself, 'What, exactly, is the claim? Does it actually make sense?' Because when a message leans heavily on buzzwords and jargon, it's often a red flag that you're being steered by rhetoric instead of reality."