• I hate when people say things like “research confirms”. That’s not how this kind of science works.
• They link to ResearchGate, which is fine enough since it has a full download of a pre-print, but here’s the original closed-access article’s page for those who do have institutional access.
• I categorically do not trust a business magazine like Inc. as a secondary source on sociological scientific literature. The author, Jessica Stillman, is listed as the source of the “Expert Opinion”, but if you look at her bio and even her website, she has zero expertise to be evaluating this. It’s fine to write an opinion; it’s not fine to misleadingly label someone as an “expert”.

The thesis of the study as stated in the abstract (of the preprint; I’m too lazy to access through my institution right now) is as follows:

Here, results from four studies (total N = 1018) report the construction and validation of the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a novel measure of individual differences in susceptibility to corporate bullshit.[*] Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech, negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking, and positively related with other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically-consistent ways. Importantly, corporate bullshit receptivity is positively associated with several workplace perception variables and is a robust negative predictor of work-related decision-making. Overall, the findings establish the CBSR as a valid and reliable tool to aid researchers and practitioners in examining the causes, correlates, and consequences of receptivity to bullshit in organizations.

* Defined as “semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way”

I encourage people to read the study('s preprint or print edition) and evaluate its methodology instead of read a headline, think “Yeah, that conforms to my existing biases”, and walk away feeling smug. I’m not remarking on the quality of the study itself, as I’m reading the methodology later when I have time.