Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Cornwell Uni researchers pivot to pluck low-hanging fruit to optimize bandwidth

Workers who believe "leveraging cross-functional synergies" sounds profound may want to rethink their career trajectory because a new study suggests people who fall for corporate word salad also tend to perform worse at their jobs.

Researchers from Cornell University have developed what they call "the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale," a tool designed to measure how impressed people are by business school-style jargon that sounds strategic but says very little.

The findings, described in a recent study, suggest that employees who rate this sort of language as insightful are more likely to struggle with analytical thinking and workplace decision-making.

To build the scale, researchers ran four studies involving more than 1,000 working adults in the US and Canada. Participants were shown a mix of genuine corporate statements and nonsense lines generated by what the researchers call a "corporate bullshit generator" – effectively a tool that mashes together buzzwords into sentences that sound like they came straight out of a quarterly strategy meeting.

Examples included lines such as "actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence." Participants were then asked to rate how meaningful or insightful the statements appeared.

The idea was to measure how easily someone interprets impressive-sounding language as legitimate business insight. According to the researchers, that trait turns out to correlate with some less flattering cognitive patterns.

People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems.

In other words, the employees most impressed by corporate jargon were also the ones least likely to think critically about it.

That doesn't mean the buzzword enthusiasts were miserable at work, though. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.

According to the researchers, people with higher receptivity to corporate jargon were more likely to view their bosses as charismatic leaders and to feel inspired by corporate messaging. They were also more likely to use the same language themselves, helping to keep the buzzword cycle alive.

The researchers say the result can create a feedback loop within organizations. Leaders who speak in vague, buzzword-heavy language may be seen as visionary by employees who find that style persuasive, which only encourages more of the same corporate word salad.

The work builds on earlier research into what psychologists call "bullshit receptivity," effectively the tendency to see deep meaning in statements designed to sound impressive while saying very little.

Applied to the workplace, the idea suggests that corporate jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight.

So the next time someone proposes "synergizing scalable paradigms," it may not be a bold strategic breakthrough. It might simply be a quick way to find out who in the room is nodding along and who is quietly wondering what on earth that was supposed to mean. ®