Shane Littrell spent years working in a corporate environment before he quit and became a researcher. His turning point, by his own account, was a boss who regularly deployed words like “synergizing,” “derivation,” and “optimal flow-through” in ways that bore no coherent relationship to meaning. That experience eventually produced one of the more satisfying pieces of workplace research published in 2026: a validated psychological instrument called the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, and a set of findings that explain, with actual data, why that boss kept getting promoted.
A Generator Built to Produce Nothing
Littrell, now a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, built a corporate BS generator by stripping Fortune 500 executive quotes down to their grammatical skeleton and randomly swapping in buzzwords harvested from annual reports and industry publications. The output: sentences that are structurally coherent and completely devoid of content. Examples include “We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”
He then mixed these machine-generated statements with actual quotes from real corporate leaders and asked more than 1,000 employed adults across four studies to rate each one’s “business savvy.”
Here is the detail that deserves its own moment: several of the real executive quotes were statistically indistinguishable from the computer-generated nonsense. They had to be removed from the analysis entirely because participants couldn’t tell them apart from the fabricated gibberish. This is either a finding or an exit interview, depending on where you work.
What the Scale Actually Measures
The resulting Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, published in Personality and Individual Differences, measures individual differences in susceptibility to impressive-sounding organizational language that doesn’t actually mean anything. It deliberately distinguishes between legitimate jargon — which can help specialists communicate efficiently — and corporate BS, which mimics the style of expertise while carefully evacuating its content.
About 26% of participants in one study rated the computer-generated gibberish as having a “good amount” or “great deal” of business savvy. These are employed adults, rating sentences a machine assembled by combining random buzzwords, as strategically insightful.
The People Most Impressed Make the Worst Decisions
The study’s most consequential finding: high corporate BS receptivity was the single strongest negative predictor of workplace decision-making quality — outperforming job satisfaction, supervisor trust, and feedback clarity as predictors of poor situational judgment. Employees who found the gibberish most impressive also performed worst on tests measuring real-world work decisions. This held up in a replication sample of finance, HR, marketing, and business administration professionals — precisely the people most likely to be making consequential decisions on a daily basis.
High BS receptivity also correlated with rating managers as more charismatic, more visionary, and more transformational — and with finding corporate mission statements genuinely inspiring. The employees most excited by organizational rhetoric, in other words, may be the least equipped to evaluate whether it makes any sense.
The Self-Reinforcing Loop
Workers who reported the highest levels of corporate BS in their organizations were also more likely to produce it themselves. Littrell describes this as a negative feedback loop: employees receptive to BS help elevate leaders who rely on it, those leaders generate more of it, and the cycle continues. “Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,'” he wrote, “a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
This matters because the loop is largely invisible from inside it. If you’ve spent years in an environment saturated with buzzwords, you may have lost the baseline to recognize when language is doing work versus performing the appearance of it.
A Potential Use in Hiring
The study suggests the scale could eventually serve as a supplemental screening tool in hiring and promotion — a resource-efficient signal of analytic thinking that’s harder to game than self-report measures and more contextually relevant than generic ability tests. Further validation is needed before any organizational application, Littrell notes, and no one is immune from being taken in by impressively packaged language in the right circumstances.
His practical recommendation is simple enough to apply immediately: when you encounter organizational messaging that leans heavily on buzzwords — a leader’s statement, a company report, an all-hands deck — slow down and ask what the claim actually is. Whether it holds up. Because according to the study’s findings, the people least likely to ask that question are also the least likely to realize they should.French chef Auguste Escoffier in the late 19th century, organized professional kitchens like military units — rigid hierarchy, unquestioning obedience, discipline enforced from the top down. A 2022 academic study of Michelin-starred kitchens found that bullying and physical abuse were frequently described by chefs as a normal, even necessary part of professional development. Those who survived wore it as a credential.
“Chefs who neglected to suffer had little claim to membership of the culinary community, in the truest sense,” noted Robin Burrow, a former Cardiff Business School lecturer who co-authored the study. The industry didn’t just tolerate this — it celebrated it. Gordon Ramsay’s televised kitchen meltdowns have drawn hundreds of millions of viewers. The Bear — which Redzepi actually appeared in during 2024 — has been praised for its accuracy by industry insiders who find it almost too familiar to watch comfortably.
What the Sidewalk Protest Actually Represents
Hassel Aviles, co-founder of hospitality advocacy nonprofit Not 9 to 5, made a point in the aftermath of Redzepi’s resignation that cuts closer to the bone than most of the industry commentary: “I really believe we’re all complicit in how we got here,” she said. “Including myself. Even diners play a role. You vote with your wallet.”
That’s the uncomfortable implication the $1,500 price tag makes vivid. The culinary world has long operated on the premise that extraordinary food justifies extraordinary conditions — that the pressure required to produce Michelin-starred plates is inseparable from the environment that produces it. The question the Noma reckoning forces is whether that was ever true, or whether it was a story the industry told itself to avoid looking too closely at what the kitchen door concealed.
Signs the Calculus Is Shifting
There are genuine signals of change. The hospitality sector has faced a severe recruitment crisis since the pandemic, with workers choosing to leave rather than endure conditions that previous generations accepted as standard. Kris Hall, founder of The Burnt Chef Project, which focuses on mental health in hospitality, notes that operators are beginning to connect staff retention to culture — recognizing that environments running on fear are also economically unsustainable.
Several industry figures described Redzepi’s resignation as the first time a chef of his stature had not just apologized but actually stepped back. Whether that matters depends on what follows — at Noma and everywhere else kitchens produce extraordinary food by methods the dining room isn’t supposed to see.
The protesters on that Silver Lake sidewalk in March understood something important. The meal and the sign were always part of the same story.
