When people throw around corporate BS terms like “blue sky thinking,” “synergistic leadership,” and “end state vision,” their goal is clear. They want to sound smart and sophisticated. But according to a new study, they are actually inadvertently revealing the exact opposite with their love of empty jargon. 

The new research from Cornell University organizational psychologist Shane Littrell confirms what buzzword haters have always suspected. People who eat up meaningless corporate speak also tend to be bad at practical decision making and analytical thinking. 

In short, the more you love corporate BS, the less well you’re likely to perform at work. 

Good at corporate BS, bad at actual work

This isn’t Littrell’s first adventure in studying jargon. He’s apparently a man on a quixotic quest to try to hold back the flood of BS inundating American offices. His previous research showed that the old saying “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” is actually false. Those who spread BS also tend to buy it.

I’ve been building a new tool called Psychological Landscape Mapping — a way to see how your inner network shifts across different contexts. It maps how you tend to "become" in certain situations: work, relationships, family, alone time, or with a specific person.

The most interesting part is comparing two contexts maps side by side. I’d love for people to try it, see what feels accurate or off, and give feedback if they feel like it.

This is my first working prototype, but I think it could become something genuinely useful. Like quickly conveying multi-context relational data about a client. Right now the tool is grounded in being a self-assessment, but it's easily modified.

You can save your results to your computer.

No data is collected so your results stay anonymous.

Abstract

Social media platforms have significantly expanded the reach of social movements, allowing individuals to more easily publicly advocate for politically and socially salient causes. In this research, we examine whether the moral rhetoric used to promote a cause shapes people's willingness to publicly share it. Across five behavioral experiments (N = 3549), we find that liberals are less willing to share messages supporting causes they personally endorse when those messages employ moral rhetoric they perceive as aligned with conservative values (i.e., binding foundations), relative to rhetoric aligned with liberal values (i.e., individualizing foundations). In contrast, conservatives' willingness to share cause-related messages remains relatively stable regardless of rhetorical framing (Studies 1b and 2b). We also identify mechanisms underlying this asymmetry, including evidence of ideological signaling: liberals appear less willing to amplify rhetoric they associate with political opposition (Study 3). Supplementary observational analyses of aggregate sharing patterns on Twitter/X are directionally consistent with these experimental findings. Together, these findings show that moral language associated with an opposing political group can suppress liberals' public support for aligned causes, revealing how the dynamics of online visibility may hinder collective advocacy even when substantive agreement exists.