Employees who found corporate gibberish most impressive also performed worst on work-related decision-making.

People who confuse gibberish and "business savvy" also fall for corporate mission statements.

The ability to recognize gibberish correlates positively with analytical thinking and fluid intelligence.

A researcher at Cornell, Shane Littrell, has done what many frustrated employees wanted to do for years: built a generator of pure corporate gibberish—you know, pearls like "actualize a renewed level of swim-lane credentialing on a vertical landscape." Then he tested whether some people actually think it sounds smart.1

Spoiler: Some really do.

More generally, BS is communication that obscures the truth with impressive-sounding nonsense. The study defined “corporate BS” as a "semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way."

The method: elegant and somewhat surreal

The researcher built a corporate BS generator by stripping real Fortune 500 executive quotes down to their grammatical skeleton and randomly swapping in buzzwords from annual reports and industry publications. The result: sentences that are syntactically coherent and semantically empty, like a power suit with no one inside. The resulting gibberish quotes were mixed with actual quotes from real CEOs and other company heads, and more than a thousand employed adults in four studies evaluated each statement's........

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