Liking corporate BS may be a sign you’re bad at decision-making, Cornell expert finds

We’ve all been there: in a work meeting, trying to stop our eyes from glazing over as a colleague spews an endless monologue about “leveraging the company’s adaptive strategy to optimize our value and reinvigorate our operations.” 

That incomprehensible, buzzword-heavy language has a name: “corporate bulls–t.” That’s at least according to Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist and a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. He studies how people evaluate and share knowledge, and how misleading information shapes people’s beliefs, attitudes, and decision-making.  

As a self-proclaimed BS-hater himself, Littrell defines BS as “dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging.” It’s easy to mistake BS for the necessary, everyday jargon used in professional settings, but its distinguishing factor is that while the language intends to sound smart or impressive, it fails to be accurate, meaningful, or if at all helpful, he told Fortune. 

Over four studies with 1,018 subjects, Littrell built the Corporate Bulls–t Receptivity Scale, a way to measure how attracted individuals are to this type of language and how business savvy they perceive different statements. People who find that buzzword-heavy corporate-speak profound and informative perform worse on measures of workplace...