Do you believe your employer when it says things like, “Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision in a world defined by architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape”?
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And if you don’t, does it matter?
A new study by Shane Littrell, a cognitive scientist and PhD student at the University of Toronto, suggests that some people do believe these things, but that financial services firms probably don’t want to hire them.
Littrell has developed a test that he calls the “The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale” (CBRS) to measure individual differences in receptivity to corporate bullshit, which he defines as “semantically empty or otherwise vague rhetoric that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a way that misrepresents or obscures some aspect of organizational reality.”
He notes that there are two aspects to the corporate bullshit: receptivity, or the tendency to find such delusive information superficially impressive or persuasive; and bullshitting frequency, or the tendency to produce such communications.
The study of both is a genuine academic pursuit, says Littrell, noting that “a growing body of research in the social and behavioral sciences,” is devoted to it.
Littrell’s gift to this field is the CBRS, which involved 300 people rating 30 statements in random order, some of which were generated by Fortune 500 CEOs and others of which were generated by a computer algorithm constructing “syntactically coherent (i.e., all nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. are in the correct places) but semantically meaningless statements.” The latter included, “pseudo-profound BS”, constructed from randomly selected New Age buzzwords.
As with previous studies of this nature, Littrell discovered that high receptivity to corporate BS was negatively correlated with open-minded thinking, an ability to detect conflicts and fluid intelligence. However, it was unrelated to age, gender, income, or education. If you score highly on his CBRS, Littrell also found you’re likely to have a propensity to deploy BS yourself.
Reflective, analytical employees don’t like corporate BS, says Littrell. It’s not just that they are, “simply less receptive to corporate speech in general. Instead, they are less impressed by corporate bullshit, specifically, and better able to discern genuine corporate speech from meaningless corporate bullshit, compared to less analytically-minded people.”
People who score high on the CBSR also turn out to be poor performers. Littrell put his sample of 300 people through a series of situational tests and found that corporate bullshit receptivity emerged as the strongest predictor of poor decision-making performance.
The implication is that Littrell’s test might work as a recruitment screening tool to help banks sort through their hundreds of thousands of applications. Littrell also suggests that financial services firms and others might also want to avoid concocting, “braggadocious “mission statements” touting their organizational values if their goal is to attract workers who are highly skilled, insightful, analytic thinkers.”
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