Artem Abalmasov reposted this
The employees most impressed by your strategy presentation scored the lowest on every measure of analytical thinking.
Cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell just built a corporate jargon generator. It produces sentences like "By integrating our core competencies, we will pressure-test a renewed framework of adaptive coherence." Grammatically correct, loaded with business terminology, completely meaningless. He asked over 1,000 office workers to rate these generated sentences alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 executives.
The workers who rated the generated nonsense as most impressive scored significantly lower on cognitive reflection, analytic thinking, and fluid intelligence. That part isn't terribly surprising. But what caught my attention is what else correlated.
Those same workers also reported higher job satisfaction, rated their supervisors as more charismatic, and felt more inspired by their company's mission. One underlying trait, call it receptivity to impressive-sounding language, predicted all three: you find jargon persuasive, you find leadership inspiring, and you score lower on every measure of analytical thinking. T
Think about what that means for engagement surveys. High scores are celebrated. Low scores trigger action plans and sometimes new leadership. The implicit assumption is that "engaged" means "effective," that feeling inspired by your company's direction is evidence that the direction is good. Littrell's data suggests those scores are partly picking up something else entirely: how receptive your workforce is to language that sounds strategic but doesn't actually mean anything.
Gordon Pennycook ran a similar experiment in 2015 using pseudo-profound sentences like "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena." People who rated that kind of language as profound also scored lower on analytical reasoning.
Littrell found that the corporate version was a stronger predictor of poor workplace decision-making than the spiritual version. Something about language that sounds like strategy is uniquely effective at bypassing critical evaluation.
The selection effect is where it compounds. Workers high on jargon receptivity were also more likely to produce and spread corporate jargon themselves. So, organizations that reward this kind of communication gradually attract, retain, and promote the people most receptive to it, who are also (on average) the weakest analytical thinkers in the applicant pool, who then generate more of it, which attracts more of the same. A slow, quiet filter that nobody installed on purpose.
Who cares? Well, the employees most energized by what you tell them may be statistically, the least equipped to evaluate whether any of it made sense. The person in the back thinking "what does that even mean" is probably your best critical thinker. The person in the front looking like you just disclosed the invention of Unobtanium may be the opposite…
Cheers!