bullshit

Bullshit is what it sounds like: mostly incomprehensible nonsense disguised as something else. Most often, this is idiocy from high up in a hierarchical organisation. Here's a bullshit line to make you see what I mean:

The cognitive load cadence that we drive should provide some low-hanging fruit.

It's impossible to know what the sentence means. It's not only confusing but also turns people off from listening further; bullshit affects both the speaker and their audience.

Bullshit is commonly used in capitalist workplaces. In this setting, bullshit is more damaging than most people understand. Thankfully, there's a lot of research done on bullshit.

[Researchers] define workplace bullshit as 'as taking place when colleagues make statements at work with no regard for the truth'.

Ferreira, Caitlin, David Hannah, Ian McCarthy, Leyland Pitt, and Sarah Lord Ferguson. 2020. “This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale.” Psychol Rep, December, 16. 10.1177/0033294120978162.

Nobody Knows What It Means

Don't worry: you're not alone. Research shows that jargon and other sorts of bullshit are rife in the modern workplace. We need to abolish all of that for the sake of clarity and to understand each other.

The higher up—organisationally speaking—bullshit comes from, the more likely it is that people lower down will adapt it and not question it.

I've read a few papers about how language at work often is damaging:

Scientific papers

Čavojová, Vladimíra, Ivan Brezina, and Marek Jurkovič. ‘Expanding the Bullshit Research out of Pseudo-Transcendental Domain’. Current Psychology 41, no. 2 (February 2022): 827–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00617-3.

Ferreira, Caitlin, David Hannah, Ian McCarthy, Leyland Pitt, and Sarah Lord Ferguson. ‘This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale’. Psychological Reports 125, no. 1 (February 2022): 448–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294120978162. Download from here.

Herold, David M., Timo Dietrich, and Tim Breitbarth. ‘Banking on Bullshit: Indifferences towards Truth in Corporate Social Responsibility’. International Journal of Bank Marketing 39, no. 4 (5 July 2021): 618–37. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJBM-04-2020-0207.

McCarthy, Ian P., David Hannah, Leyland F. Pitt, and Jane M. McCarthy. ‘Confronting Indifference toward Truth: Dealing with Workplace Bullshit’. Business Horizons 63, no. 3 (May 2020): 253–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2020.01.001. Download from here.

McEachern, Peter J, and Robert W McEachern. ‘Should We Teach Students How to Bullshit?’ Writing and Pedagogy 14, no. 2 (11 November 2022). https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.21554.

The problem

These papers have one thing in common: they show that jargon (trendy jargon in particular), abbreviations, puffery, shallow company slogans, and buzzwords ultimately lead to this:

In the long run, bullshit—which is now actually an actual term for this—hurts companies. If people stop listening and start bullshitting: who do you think wins? Nobody.

A solution

I don't think there is one solution but many. Bad ideas, bad habits, and ways can be tough to kill.

Companies must:

Above and below are examples of why bullshit hurt people and the companies they work for. Imagine if bullshit weren't an issue. Wow.

In Confronting Indifference toward Truth: Dealing with Workplace Bullshit, the writers present their C.R.A.P. framework to preempt bullshit.

The paper suggests ways to deal with workplace BS using a memorable acronym — C.R.A.P.:

Hannah said the paper reminds corporate leaders to be attentive about using BS. And he admits employees have a difficult choice if they decide to act when a supervisor resorts to BS. He recommends handling this situation gently by asking for evidence or logic to substantiate opinions, and by encouraging critical thinking.

@cbc https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sfu-prof-crap-workplace-bs-1.5475307

To preempt the spread of bullshit in the workplace, McCarthy and his colleagues recommend that organizations foster a culture of inviting employees to think critically—which involves a mix of skepticism, curiosity, and rational inquiry. A 2015 study suggests that openly valuing critical thinking in organizational settings can help to quell bullshit. Another way to put this is that organizations should value evidence over opinions and expertise over egalitarianism—the idea, in this context, that everyone has something equally useful to say about a given issue or subject and that crowd-sourcing these views works well. McCarthy and his colleagues say this is likely to generate ideas based more off of intuition than evidence, making such crowd-sourced input a “reagent for bullshit production.”

https://www.ethicalsystems.org/the-c-r-a-p-framework-for-addressing-workplace-bullshit/

Quotes from scientific papers

From This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale

Analyses revealed three factors of organizational bullshit, termed regard for truth, the boss and bullshit language.

Drawing on Frankfurt (2009), McCarthy et al. (2020, p. 254) define workplace bullshit as “as taking place when colleagues make statements at work with no regard for the truth.

As bullshitters don’t care what the truth is, this affords them freedom to say whatever it takes to further their agenda (McCarthy et al.,2020). This freedom from truth and evidence can mean that bullshit is some-times misperceived as something profound (Pennycook et al., 2015) or, alternatively, viewed as an empty claim (Spicer, 2020).

Workplaces are awash with many forms of bullshit that manifest in many different ways, including misrepresentation, where leaders make statements without knowing the facts; meaningless job titles (Graeber, 2018); fake and shallow company slogans (e.g. Lee et al., 2020); and workplace puffery such as resumé padding (Grover, 2005). Under some circumstances, organizational bullshit, usually referred to as “banter”, “badinage” or “joshing” can be harm-less, often creative, and even contribute to a congenial atmosphere in an organization. Organizational bullshit may even have a positive effect when leaders articulate inspiring futuristic, but largely uncertain visions, that are meant to inspire others to act (Christensen et al., 2019). On the other hand, other scholars have outlined a number of detrimental effects of bullshit. McCarthy et al. (2020), while acknowledging there can be positive effects of organizational bull-shit, also caution that it can result in lower job satisfaction among the organization’s members, increased distrust in leadership, a reduction in productivity,and ultimately a negative impact on overall performance (McCarthy et al., 2020).

Applying the logic of Petrocelli (2018), leaders will be driven to bull-shit when the social and professional expectations to have an opinion are high, and when they expect to get away with it. These two conditions are subject to how (un)knowledgeable their audience is. Similarly, if leaders exhibit high levels of overconfidence, and believe they are popular amongst their peers, this will make them likely to engage in more bullshit-related behavior (Jerrim et al., 2019).

McCarthy et al. (2020) refer to a number of bullshit expressions such as “blue-sky thinking” or “out-of-the-box thinking”, which are often used as vague buzzwords with minimal substance. This vagueness serves the interests of bullshitters, because communication targets are less likely to ask questions when they find it difficult to understand what has been said (McCarthy et al., 2020).

The second dimension, the boss, confirms that employees believe that their superiors are key players in the dissemination of bullshit. Bullshit aims only to serve an immediate end – whether to puff up one’s reputation or to advance their point of view or argument (Gibson, 2011). Further, employees are likely to have to take action based on any bullshit communicated by their bosses. As a result, employees are likely to be acutely aware when their superiors use bullshit to advance their own self-interests.

The final dimension, bullshit language,considers some of the commonly used types of language employed by bullshitters, namely the excessive use of acronyms and jargon. The finding that employees perceive that the excessive use of such language is a form of bullshit confirms that they are not oblivious to its use in the workplace. They may share the opinion of McCarthy et al. (2020, p. 258),who argued that “if a statement is riddled with meaningless language, acronyms, buzzwords, and jargon, then it is likely to be bullshit.” It is possible that the excessive use of acronyms and jargon may occur to employees as an exclusionary mechanism in the workplace, whereby those unfamiliar with the terminology may not be able to meaningfully contribute to the conversation or voice their concerns.

From Confronting Indifference toward Truth: Dealing with Workplace Bullshit

Abstract Many organizations are drowning in a flood of corporate bullshit, and this is particularly true of organizations in trouble, whose managers tend to makeup stuff on the fly and with little regard for future consequences. Bullshitting and lying are not synonymous. While the liar knows the truth and wittingly bends it to suit their purpose, the bullshitter simply does not care about the truth. Managers can actually do something about organizational bullshit, and this Executive Digest provides a sequential framework that enables them to do so. They can comprehend it, they can recognize it for what it is, they can act against it, and they can take steps to prevent it from happening in the future. While it is unlikely that any organization will ever be able to rid itself of bullshit entirely, this article argues that by taking these steps, astute managers can work toward stemming its flood.

Bullshit has become so commonplace that it is suggested that business communications are dominated by truthiness (in which the validity of something is based on how it feels), post-fact language (taking a position that ignores facts), and echo chambers (where positive-feedback loops create cravings for and fuel the spread of bullshit; Berthon & Pitt, 2018). Frankfurt (2009, p. 63)argued: “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Thus,the more often colleagues at work are asked to comment on matters about which they know little or nothing, the more bullshit there is.

[...] when we engage in work, we must distinguish between this type of social bullshit, which can be harmless or even helpful to the organization (because it can enable the development of normal interpersonal relationships), and other types of bullshit that can have damaging impacts on the organization.

[...] consider when a manager tells employees that they must do a task in a certain way because it is so specified in the union’s collective agreement, but the manager has no idea whether this specification in the collective agreement actually exists or not. In this case, the manager is consciously bullshitting. They are not lying, because they do not know whether the task is actually specified in the collective agreement.

Furthermore, a bullshitter’s statements may never have been intended to be believed or even to garner much attention. They are intended to misrepresent by being appealing or convincing, or by distracting, exhausting, or disengaging colleagues, so that agendas can be pursued with little or no resistance. This lack of awareness of the true nature of workplace bullshit is one of the reasons why there is such an abundance of it (Fredal, 2011).

Remember that bullshitters, unrestricted by truth, have more freedom to frame their statements. They are at liberty to devise appealing bullshit with three significant characteristics. First, the bullshit may offer personal benefits to the audience. For example, if a scientist in a research and development (R&D) department hears some bullshit from their boss that suggests the company is about to double the R&D budget, the scientist is likely to find this bullshit appealing. In addition, some employees may also relish or need workplace bullshit so as to flourish in their jobs. They view bullshit as a necessary aspect of organizational life. Trendy jargon, flaky logic, and shallow arguments can be so appealing to some that they provide them with direction and energy.

Third, the audience is more likely to find the bullshit appealing if they also find it credible. A key to credibility is the identity of the person communicating the bullshit.

[...] some bullshitters bullshit because they are naive, biased, or sloppy in their handling of statements. They do not realize they are crafting or spreading bullshit. There is a primary need therefore to be alert to the possibility of bullshit. While accepting its ubiquity, one must avoid becoming so accustomed to bullshit as to be indifferent to its presence. In other words, it is necessary to develop a healthy cynicism about the possibility of bullshit.

The cornerstone to recognizing bullshit is knowing how it masquerades. This involves recognizing how colleagues go about framing statements (in written, spoken, or graphical form) that are without regard for the truth. Typically, such statements are abstract and general in nature and come across as the opposite of plain English. The statements will lack details, sources, and logic,and they will be full of logical disconnects and gaps. Furthermore, if a statement is riddled with meaningless language, acronyms, buzzwords, and jargon, then it is likely to be bullshit.

When faced with ‘jargonese,’ often people assume that they are missing something, or they confuse vagueness for profundity. The rule holds however,that if it is not possible to understand what the words in a statement mean, then it is reasonable to suspect the statement to be bullshit.

What people think and state depends on how they think. Thus, it is far more dangerous to assume people know what they are talking about than it is to assume they do not and then let them prove you wrong.

Critical thinking is the opposite of the quick, automatic, skim-based thinking that produces and spreads workplace bullshit. It is thinking that is slower, more effortful, more calculating, and more conscious. Prolific bullshitters themselves are likely to be more effective at critical thinking, which is one reason for the view that “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

Research by Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler, and Fugelsang (2015) suggests that an organization’s capacity to produce and accept workplace bullshit decreases with the prevalence of and value placed on critical thinking in that organization. They outline how individuals have different sensitivities to bullshit: Those who have the ability to stop and think analytically about the substance of statements are less receptive to bullshit, while those with lower cognitive skills and less insight are more receptive.

Colleagues throughout the organization, and especially those in administrative and leadership roles, should also practice it so that evidence can guide key decisions. This is also true in the areas of marketing and sales, which thrive on the creation and circulation of bullshit.

Furthermore, to help encourage and value evidence over opinion, managers should be careful whom they consult. While they should seek substantive debate about statements and supporting evidence, they should only involve well-informed and value-adding experts. Social media and crowdsourcing initiatives regularly remind us that the wisdom of the crowd is not as judicious as we think.

Finally, any approach to evidence-based management should ensure that the practices suit the industry and functional context. For example,professionals in a biotechnology company would be expected to follow and use industry-appropriate evidence-based practices that are likely to be more rigorous and extensive than those adopted by a fashion-clothing company. Such practices include encouraging or even requiring their employees to do the following four things (see Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006): (1) demand evidence for statements that seem implausible; (2) examine the logic or cause-and-effect reasoning between the evidence and the statement; (3) as needed, encourage experimentation to test the confidence of data and validity of statements; and (4) continually repeat and build on the first three activities to create an evidence-based learning culture that stifles the production and spread of bullshit.

When bullshit is legitimized and codified, it spreads more easily and is likely to be more influential. This in turn fosters the future production of more bullshit.

Abstract from Banking on bullshit: indifferences towards truth in corporate social responsibility

Purpose
This study aims to identify and deconstruct bullshit in banks' corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication to advance the management rhetoric research space, which has been characterised by an indifference to truth and meaning.

Design/methodology/approach
We provide a typology of bullshit phenomena overview in the banking sector and follow the McCarthy et al.'s (2020) C.R.A.P. framework from to showcase how bullshit can be comprehended, recognised, acted against and prevented.

Findings
This paper puts a spotlight on written and spoken language to detect bullshit in banks' CSR statements. It provides actionable insights into how stakeholders can act against and prevent bullshit statements from occurring in the future.

Research limitations/implications
Future research is warranted to assess the use of still imagery, events and video materials in corporate communications and non-financial reporting. Further rigorous assessment of actual CSR initiatives must be undertaken to assess claimed contributions.

Practical implications
Monitoring mechanisms and independent assurance statements prepared by authorised third parties may strengthen the motivation and ethicality of CSR activities.

Originality/value
This viewpoint is the first to follow the C.R.A.P framework and critically assess indifferences towards truth in banks' CSR communications.

Abstract from Expanding the Bullshit Research out of Pseudo-Transcendental Domain

The ability to distinguish bullshit from factual, but less appealing, information is becoming a crucial skill in present-day society.The aim of this paper was to extend the research conducted by Pennycook et al. (Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549–563,2015) by developing and validating the General Bullshit Receptivity Scale (GBRS), designed to measure bullshit in more general and non-transcendental context, than the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR). In this paper we assessed the psychometric properties of the GBRS on representative sample of Slovak participants (N= 458) and explored the relation between the GBRS and original BSR scale, epistemically suspect beliefs, ontological confusion, spirituality, personality and analytical thinking.People who thought the randomly generated transcendental statements were more profound were more susceptible to accepting more general bullshit and other epistemically suspect beliefs, and this tendency was accompanied with a low level of analytical thinking. Non-cognitive factors (agreeableness, spirituality) also contributed to perceptions the bullshit was profound and truthful. The most“impressive”bullshit was bullshit that did not contain obscure vocabulary but seemingly provided recipients with intuitive, though untruthful insights. We believe we have succeeded in constructing and refining a new measure for detecting other kind of bullshit that enables us to better understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms and personality variables.