Shane Littrell, PhD

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal Gunnar Ridderström/Pexels As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleag…

“I was really shocked that an article published in a Springer journal and which presumably had gone through a peer or editorial review could have such a high number of references to hallucinated articles. I can see how one or two may slip through the net, but this was a preposterous number.”

Reviewer notes: In a randomized experiment, the pre-post differences are not effect estimates Reviewer notes are a new short format with brief explanations of basic ideas that might come in handy during (for example) the peer-review process. They are a great way to keep Julia from writing 10,0...

P.S. Pre-post differences are *not* valid treatment effect estimates. Why? Here's a post by @statsepi.bsky.social: statsepi.substack.com/p/one-simple..., here's a post by me: www.the100.ci/2025/01/22/r... >

a man in a blue shirt says it 's a possibility ALT: a man in a blue shirt says it 's a possibility

🤔

Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs | Cornell Chronicle Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study into “corporate BS” r...

Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” struggle with decision-making.

The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale measures susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric. news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs | Cornell Chronicle Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study into “corporate BS” r...

Some nice coverage of my latest paper in today's Cornell Chronicle:

"Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies."
news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

Footnotes from the Margins

I love footnotes, so I'll occasionally share my favs.

@metacognishane.bsky.social, in his post about the story of what bullshit actually means, points out something this poster has never ever done, nuh uh, nope never... 😅😬

bullshitology.substack.com/p/bullshit-w...

We recently submitted a commentary on a very influential meta-analysis. We found that: 1) 40% of relevant literature had not been identified because of lazy search, 2) a few large N included studies did not meet stated inclusion criteria, and 3) that almost all sig. moderator findings were wrong.

198 effect sizes in ego depletion resesrch showed an effect size of d=0.62. Preregistered large replications (including some by original authors) yielded an effect size of 0. No one has been able to offer any other explanation for this huge research waste than massive p-hacking.

Research by @metacognisgane.bsky.social has spawned the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, significantly associated with measures of analytic thinking, organizational culture and job performance, and a robust predictor of work-related decision-making:

buff.ly/UHWSojf

TL;DR:🧵 buff.ly/2BwSUQ9

Political polarization as a co-adaptive process Abstract. Political polarization is often characterized as a consequence of changes in media content or technology. We argue, in contrast, for an account t

"The current paper argues for a more explicitly interactive, co-adaptive account for trends in communications technology and politics." 👏
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...

Inflation hit this girl hard and she did not like it 😂 (9 quid for 2 ice creams) #funny #viral #kids YouTube video by Lisners

Exactly how I felt last time I was in TN and saw that Publix is selling Blue Bell for nearly $10 per tub now. www.youtube.com/shorts/wMgNz...

What the weather in NY has been like the past two weeks:

The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes From boardrooms and brown bags to emails and earnings calls, business culture often seems overrun by “corporate bullshit,” a semantically empty and of…

🧵Happy to announce, "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes" is now published! 😀🥳 (see replies below for more info)

Official version: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Open-access version: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(5/5) Finally, the CBSR is a robust predictor of work-relevant decision making (SJTs) and outperforms the popular Pseudo-Profound Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR; Pennycook et al., 2015) for predicting work-relevant outcomes.

(4/5) Higher corporate bullshit receptivity is strongly associated w/ various "bullshitty" aspects of the workplace and organizational culture.

(3/5) Across 4 studies (N = 1,018), CBSR shows strong evidence of validity & reliability. Corporate BS receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech. Associated w/ analytic-thinking and other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically consistent ways.

(2/5) Corporate bullshit = a semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way (Littrell, 2026).

The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes From boardrooms and brown bags to emails and earnings calls, business culture often seems overrun by “corporate bullshit,” a semantically empty and of…

🧵Happy to announce, "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes" is now published! 😀🥳 (see replies below for more info)

Official version: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Open-access version: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Inflation hit this girl hard and she did not like it 😂 (9 quid for 2 ice creams) #funny #viral #kids YouTube video by Lisners

Exactly how I felt last time I was in TN and saw that Publix is selling Blue Bell for nearly $10 per tub now. www.youtube.com/shorts/wMgNz...

I got a similar critic reception last time I submitted a paper to JPSP.

Quelle surprise.

Ya know, I used to feel a (very) small twinge of empathy for the dude every time I used him & his nonsense as examples of bullshit/bullshitting in my papers and talks.

Not any more! Maybe instead of examples of bullshitting, I'll use him as an example of "Creepshitting."

I reviewed an earlier version of this paper. I think it's interesting, because you can tell by reading it that evolutionary psychology still lacks a loyal opposition and a healthy error culture.
It's a defensive paper, targeted at people who believe evolution stops at the neck, YouTubers, _others_

New Bullshitology post is up! bit.ly/4k942E7

This week, I talk about famous figures from psychology's past whose major contributions were later discovered to be fishy, if not fraudulent. Check it out when you get time!

Took a road trip a couple of weeks ago and was able to visit my parents for a few days. Was digging around in some boxes of stuff in my old room and found a treasure trove of old “elementary school book fair” gold:

What have Oliver Sacks, Stanley Milgram, David Rosenhan, and Philip Zimbardo in common?

They lied and bullshitted themselves to fame, while being candid about their personal lives, as @metacognishane.bsky.social explains:

buff.ly/Pg0tR0B

New Bullshitology post is up! bit.ly/4k942E7

This week, I talk about famous figures from psychology's past whose major contributions were later discovered to be fishy, if not fraudulent. Check it out when you get time!

US science after a year of Trump

"More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research." via @nature.com

Dark Age 2.0

(1/3)

New paper out in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology: Conflict Detection across Various Probabilistic Reasoning Tasks.

The article: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TXJ4F...

Open-access version: www.wdeneys.org/data/Haen_et...

With Eva Janssen, Peter Verkoeijen, Wim de Neys & Tamara van Gog.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of social norms messaging approaches for improving health behaviours in developed countries - Nature Human Behaviour Social norms approaches are widely applied in health promotion. This pre-registered systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs using social norms messaging in developed countries aimed to evaluate th...

Meta-analysis: After correcting for publication bias, there is no effect of “social norm messaging” nudges on health behavior

We need theories that explain *why* these interventions don’t work

www.nature.com/articles/s41...