Science Finally Confirms It: People Who Fall for Corporate Buzzwords Are Worse at Their Jobs

Someone in a meeting says your company needs to "actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" to create "a hyper-connected, frictionless, and impact-minded global enterprise."

You have two options. You can nod along, perhaps make a note, and think about how that applies to your team's Q3 swim lanes. Or you can recognize that nothing meaningful was just said — that those words, arranged in that order, do not communicate a coherent idea — and silently wonder who promoted this person.

New research out of Cornell University confirms that which option you choose predicts your job performance with uncomfortable precision.

The people who nod along? They're not just wrong about the buzzwords. They're wrong about a lot of things.

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Act 1: The Study

Shane Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher and cognitive psychologist at Cornell University, spent several years developing what he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale" — a validated psychometric tool for measuring how susceptible workers are to corporate jargon that sounds impressive but communicates nothing.

The academic definition of "bullshit" used in the study is precise: "a type of semantically, logically or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative or otherwise engaging." Corporate bullshit specifically uses puzzling buzzwords and jargon that is "semantically empty and often confusing" — used by management to persuade and impress, sometimes to inflate perceptions of the company to workers and investors.

To test this, Littrell built a tool that generates corporate-speak statements algorithmically. It produces things like:

He then mixed AI-generated statements with real quotes from Fortune 500 company leaders — statements that were equally vague but produced by actual executives — and presented the combined set to approximately 1,000 office workers. Participants were asked to rate each statement's "business savvy."

The key question: could they tell the difference between computer-generated nonsense and real executive communications? And what did their ability — or inability — to do so predict about their actual job performance?

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Act 2: What They Found

Workers who rated the bullshit statements highly — who were impressed by them, who found them credible or insightful — scored measurably lower on:

• Analytical thinking
• Cognitive reflection (the ability to override an intuitive but wrong answer)
• Fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems without relying on prior knowledge)

And crucially: when presented with realistic workplace scenarios and asked which decision they would make, the corporate-bullshit-susceptible workers "chose the worst solutions to those problems on a consistent basis."

The sample was not made up of low-education workers. Participants included people with bachelor's degrees and PhDs, working in HR, accounting, marketing, and finance. Littrell is explicit on this point: "This isn't something that only affects people who are less intelligent. Anybody can fall for bullshit, and we all, depending on the situation, fall for bullshit when it is kind of packaged up to appeal to our biases."

This is important. The finding is not "dumb people like buzzwords." The finding is that susceptibility to this specific type of language — language designed to sound impressive while saying nothing — correlates with impaired practical judgment even in educated, credentialed professionals.

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Act 3: The Upside (There's Always an Upside)

The study isn't entirely damning. There's a meaningful flip side.

Workers who rated their supervisors as highly charismatic and "visionary" — language that often correlates with corporate-speak-heavy leadership styles — reported higher job satisfaction and were more inspired by their company's mission statement. They also rated their managers as more compelling leaders.

This is not a trivial finding. Organizations run partly on morale. A leader who can inspire people — even through somewhat empty rhetoric — may produce real performance gains at the team level, even if the individual followers of that rhetoric make worse decisions in isolation.

But it draws a sharp distinction between two things that organizations frequently conflate: inspiring people and making good decisions. The workers most inspired by corporate rhetoric are making worse calls. The workers most immune to it are less motivated.

The study suggests organizations may be systematically selecting for and promoting the wrong combination of traits — favoring people who are enthusiastic about corporate vision at the expense of people who can think clearly about operational problems.

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Act 4: The Historical Record

Littrell cites two case studies worth examining in full.

Pepsi, 2009. Pepsi's design agency produced a 27-page internal document justifying a proposed logo redesign. The document opened with "by investing in our history and brand ethos we can create a new trajectory forwards" and proceeded through dense pseudo-scientific language comparing Pepsi's logo to the Vitruvian Man, Earth's magnetic field, and the universe's gravitational pull. The rebrand cost approximately $1.5 million. The result: a nearly imperceptible change to the logo's proportions that was widely mocked. The document itself became an internet artifact of corporate-jargon excess.

The executives who approved the budget had presumably read the document. The employees who should have said "this makes no sense" either didn't, or were overruled by people who found it compelling.

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos. Holmes was among the most accomplished corporate bullshitters of her generation — deploying language about "democratizing healthcare" and "the Edison technology" to woo investors, journalists, and board members. She raised $945 million. The technology didn't work. The fraud she perpetrated resulted in a federal conviction in 2022.

The investors and board members who missed it were not naive people. They were wealthy, educated, experienced in business. But they were susceptible to the specific combination of visionary language, personal charisma, and corporate-speak that Holmes delivered — and their susceptibility cost investors, patients, and federal regulators years of damage.

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Act 5: Why Organizations Keep Producing This

Corporate jargon is not accidental. It serves real functions within organizations — and some of those functions are not entirely malicious.

Shared language builds in-group cohesion. Vague language creates deniability. Impressive-sounding language signals membership in a professional class. And in hierarchical organizations, using the language of the layer above you is a rational career strategy regardless of whether the language means anything.

The problem Littrell's research identifies is the selection effect: organizations that tolerate and reward corporate-speak are actively selecting for workers who are susceptible to it. Those workers then rise in the hierarchy. They hire people like them. They promote people who speak fluently in the dialect. They fire or marginalize people who don't — often labeling them "not a culture fit" or "not a team player."

Over time, the organizations most saturated with bullshit become the organizations with the most impaired decision-making. Not because the individuals are unintelligent, but because the culture has systematically filtered for a trait — bullshit receptivity — that turns out to correlate inversely with practical judgment.

Littrell has built a validated measurement scale precisely for this reason: so organizations can actually test for it. Whether any organization will use it to hire fewer bullshit-susceptible people — or use it to screen out the critics — is an open question.

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