By KIM BELLARD

We are living, you’d have to say, in the age of bullshit. Our politicians can’t answer the simplest of questions without spouting word salad answers aimed at running out the clock until the next question. Our corporations spew endless platitudes about their lofty goals in an attempt to distract us from their mendacious profit-seeking. And now we have AI producing endless volumes of words, an unpredictable amount of which aren’t remotely true.

For better or worse (and, trust me, it has often been for worse), I’ve always been one to ask “why,” to probe vagueness — whether it was a teacher, a boss, or a politician. Call me cynical, call me skeptical, call me inquisitive, but I have a low tolerance for bullshit, in its many forms. So I was thrilled to see that a new study suggests that employees who don’t fall for corporate bullshit may be better employees.

The study is from Shane Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher and cognitive psychologist at Cornell University, whose research “focuses primarily on how people evaluate and share knowledge, particularly the ways that misleading information (e.g., bullshit, conspiracy theories, corporate messaging) influence people’s beliefs, attitudes, and decisions.”

One wonders what he was like as a child.

His new research introduces a new tool called the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), which was “designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.”

His paper defines “bullshit” as “a type of semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging,” and distinguishes it from other types of speech (such as jargon) in that “it is both functionally misleading and epistemically irresponsible.”