alt Hacker NewsIn the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.
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from TFA:
> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like
"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."
What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this: powertalk vs. babytalk
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.