Employees who found corporate gibberish most impressive also performed worst on work-related decision-making.

People who confuse gibberish and "business savvy" also fall for corporate mission statements.

The ability to recognize gibberish correlates positively with analytical thinking and fluid intelligence.

A researcher at Cornell, Shane Littrell, has done what many frustrated employees wanted to do for years: built a generator of pure corporate gibberish—you know, pearls like "actualize a renewed level of swim-lane credentialing on a vertical landscape." Then he tested whether some people actually think it sounds smart.1

Spoiler: Some really do.

More generally, BS is communication that obscures the truth with impressive-sounding nonsense. The study defined “corporate BS” as a "semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way."

The method: elegant and somewhat surreal

The researcher built a corporate BS generator by stripping real Fortune 500 executive quotes down to their grammatical skeleton and randomly swapping in buzzwords from annual reports and industry publications. The result: sentences that are syntactically coherent and semantically empty, like a power suit with no one inside. The resulting gibberish quotes were mixed with actual quotes from real CEOs and other company heads, and more than a thousand employed adults in four studies evaluated each statement's "business savvy."

The fact that several real executive quotes were indistinguishable from the computer-generated nonsense and had to be removed from analysis because participants couldn't tell the difference is either a finding or a resignation letter, depending on where you work.

Study 1 helped refine the instrument, the Corporate Bullsh*t Receptivity Scale (CBRS). Study 2 also measured participants' analytic thinking (four scales covering open-minded thinking, willingness to engage with opposing views, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence), pseudo-profound BS Receptivity Scale (the established Pennycook scale), general profoundness receptivity, and participants' own BSing frequency.

Study 3 and its replication (Study 4) measured a number of work-related outcomes, including supervisor trust and leadership perceptions, and, importantly, a Situational Judgment Test (SJT) measuring work-related decision-making quality.

Surreal or not, the study both validated the CBSR instrument and produced several findings with genuine organizational implications.

People who find corporate gibberish impressive also make measurably worse decisions at work. Across the analyses in Studies 3 and 4, corporate BS receptivity was the single significant negative predictor of situational judgment test performance, outperforming every other variable in the model, including job satisfaction, feedback clarity, and trust in one's supervisor. Importantly, the effect was replicated in a second, more educated sample of finance, human resources, marketing, and business administration professionals—in other words, the people who are quite likely to make workplace decisions daily.

People who are more receptive to corporate BS also rate their managers as more trustworthy, more visionary, and more transformational, and find corporate mission statements more inspiring. Buzzwords fly around because with some, they land. While generally, the business savvy of BS statements was rated quite low, about 26 percent of participants in Study 2 rated them as having "a good amount" (23 percent) or "a great deal" (3 percent) of business savvy.2

Workers who report the highest levels of BS in their organizations are also more likely to produce it themselves. There are two ways to read this. More generously, these people are conforming to an organizational social norm. Less generously, they selected into that environment because it rewards skills they already had. Both explanations can be true for different people.

The ability to distinguish gibberish from real communication correlates positively with analytical thinking and fluid intelligence, specifically with actively open-minded thinking and the kind of reasoning that detects when a claim doesn't actually hold up. This leads to the study's most practically radical suggestion: that the CBSR could eventually serve as a supplemental tool in hiring and promotion decisions, a resource-efficient signal of analytic thinking that is harder to game than self-report measures and more contextually relevant than generic ability tests. However, this could only be a supplemental instrument if further validated for selection. Nobody is guaranteed to never fall for impressively packaged BS.

The CBRS validation gives us a tool that captures individual differences in susceptibility to a pervasive form of organizational noise; it also helps predict decision-making quality and perceptions of leadership. It does not, of course, give us a complete picture. Future research needs to examine whether BS receptivity might be sensitive to organizational experience or interventions, or whether it remains relatively stable, as the fluid intelligence finding suggests. It needs to look across cultures. And it needs to test whether the CBSR's promise as a selection tool holds up against actual long-term job performance, not just situational judgment scores. But having a validated tool for something most of us have often complained about while relying on intuition to assess is a great start.

As for me, I am putting everything through a plain language translator. Only partially kidding.

1. Littrell, S. (2026). The Corporate Bullsh*t Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes. Personality and Individual Differences, 255, 113699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113699

2. Study supplemental materials publicly available on the Open Science Framework/provided by the author.

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