Corporate bullshit considered harmful

Communication in modern business culture often uses a unique style of seemingly incoherent, buzzword-heavy speech that includes incomprehensible neologisms that I think wouldn’t look out of place in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Oceania, such as “growth hacking” and “thought showers”.

The author of this week’s paper argues that this style of communication can sometimes be characterised as a form of bullshit, i.e. dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging. This sets it apart from jargon, which also sounds incomprehensible to outsiders but does carry real meaning for members of particular industries or professional groups. Corporate bullshit often mimics an organisation’s jargon-filled communication style, but in a semantically empty or misleading way.

Bullshit can spread unintentionally (i.e. misinformation) or intentionally via bullshitting (i.e. disinformation) to further a covert goal that benefits the spreader (side note: At AI4Debunk, we are working on tools that aim to detect bullshit within the context of climate change and the war in Ukraine.).

Within organisational contexts, bullshit is often used intentionally to navigate uncomfortable situations (deflect, distract, or shift blame and/or attention), impress supervisors and coworkers, or communicate feel-good mission statements. This makes some people view corporate bullshit as harmless or even beneficial.

But in reality, bullshit may actually hurt a company’s bottom line. Corporate bullshit can only thrive in environments where at least some people are receptive to it (side note: Or put more bluntly: environments where people are prone to falling for bullshit.). Given that bullshit receptivity is linked to lower intelligence, predicts certain types of poor decision-making and a tendency to endorse and spread fake news (and other suspect claims), it is likely that employees who are receptive to bullshit individually or collectively undermine organisational effectiveness.

The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR (side note: “BS” stands for “bullshit”, so “Scale” isn’t part of the abbreviation.)) is a tool that is designed to measure how receptive an individual is to corporate bullshit. It is constructed and validated over the course of four studies, with 1018 participants in total.

As I’m a software engineer, the tool itself is of little use to me (I’m not going to measure the bullshit receptivity of colleagues or applicants), so I won’t go into the tool itself in this summary but instead focus on the insights that came out of these studies.

In the first study, participants were presented with a set of twenty statements, of which ten were created using an algorithmic bullshit creator and another ten were actual quotes from Fortune 500 business leaders. Participants were asked to rate how much “business savvy” each statement expresses.

The results show that, for many people, “elite” corporate speech (side note: I don’t know what this means.) can be virtually indistinguishable from algorithmically generated bullshit. This was the case for six of the statements. After excluding these from the analysis, it appears that there is a significant difference between corporate bullshit statements and real corporate speech quotes, suggesting that receptivity to corporate bullshit is distinct from an affinity for real corporate speech.

The second study compares the CBSR to various measures of analytic thinking and intelligence, and scores on other bullshit-related measures, including receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit, proclivity (side note: ≈tendency) for bullshitting others, and perceptions of bullshit in the workplace.

The CBSR is significantly and negatively associated with actively open-minded thinking, fluid intelligence, and conflict detection. There is also a positive association between receptivity to corporate bullshit and general corporate speech, which is unsurprising given that it is hard to survive in a corporate environment if you are not receptive to corporate speech.

Corporate bullshit receptivity scores are positively correlated with many other bullshit-related measures, and also to frequency of persuasive bullshitting (side note: i.e. bullshitting in order to impress, as opposed to evasive bullshitting (bullshitting to avoid harm).). Somewhat ironically, participants who report higher amounts of bullshit in their organisations not only struggle to accurately identify bullshit but also engage more frequently in spreading it themselves.

The goal of the third and fourth studies is to establish the CBSR’s scientific and practical utility by comparing its scores to work-relevant and job performance variables that are theorised to be especially vulnerable to corporate bullshit. The two studies are more or less the same, except that the fourth study uses a short form of the CBSR and is conducted with a slightly more educated worker sample.

The results of these studies provide strong evidence that the CBSR can predict a diverse set of work-related variables, including job satisfaction, trust in one’s supervisor, and the degree to which an employee is inspired by official corporate mission statements and their supervisors. Crucially, CBSR is a strong, negative predictor of work-related decision-making.

The last finding in particular suggests that proliferation of corporate bullshit can have genuinely negative real-world outcomes for organisations (side note: Some of these sound a bit far-fetched to me though…). High-quality workers may choose to leave companies where corporate bullshit is the norm, while remaining workers may misinterpret important directives or feedback.