- 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.
This matches my assumptions. Though I’ve often wondered how often people using vapid language know they’re being vapid
They’re building a nobility class for the technofeudal future.
It’s just their ideas are inbred and dysfunctional this time, as opposed to their genealogies in days of yore.
As fucking insane as Scott Adams turned out to be, he was onto something with the whole ‘people get promoted proportional to their general incompetence’ thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
They’re actively self selecting for people who acclimate to the corpo work climate, because to these people, that is their primary identity, its what gives their lives meaning… its far more important to be at work, than it is to actually accomplish anything.
I really don’t see anyway that you could be aware of the current state of LinkedIn and not agree with this.
These people are like… actually fucked in the head, totally delusional narcissists.
They legitimately got so lost in the sauce that corporate culture became primary to actually being able to do their jobs.
Being a corporate wonk … became the signifier, and they literally forgot how to perform the thing it is supposed to signify.
They’re a parody of productivity, but the performance of that parody is superior to … basically everything else.
This is a big reason why basically all companies could not fucking handle the idea of a mass work from home paradigm shift.
It literally doesn’t matter to management that productivity broadly increased, that introvert employees became much more productive, that morale went up, that people overall were saving tons of money and time not commuting, that the company could save money with less need for physical office space.
What matters is they don’t get to be helicopter parents to their adopted cubicle children, they don’t feel special, important, that they can’t walk back to their corner cubicle with a sense of elitism that they get a window view after a meeting that could have been an email.
They have to feel superior to people in their primary social environment.
That’s what is most important, their lifestyle of malevolent, materially destructive narcissism.
Wasn’t this a 100-person survey with dubious questions?
This article cites a meta study of 4 others.
The article isn’t citing other studies in the traditional sense of a meta-analysis (which maybe you didn’t mean). It’s four studies conducted by the author whose results are self-contained within this paper and effectively function as a pipeline: study 3 relies on the results from study 2 relies on study 1.
I didn’t at a glance see study 4 in the preprint, but maybe that’s only in the official print version. I plan to read the methodology in full later.
