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Businessweek brings us news of How to Get Ahead by Speaking Vaguely. Projecting power is incredibly simple: just communicate in abstractions. Details convey weakness.
In one of the seven experiments, participants read quotes from a politician who described an earthquake as killing 120 and injuring 400; later, when he simply said it was a national tragedy, subjects thought he was a better leader.
An author of the study, Cheryl J. Wakslak (University of Southern California), cautions however against meaningless business jargon — words such as "ideaate" and "deliverables" that some workers resort to when trying to seem impressive. "Being completely vague will just make you sound stupid," she explains. "Bulls———is best when it has a kernel of truth in it."
The report was published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the full report is available at Using Abstract Language Signals Power (pdf)
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday July 21 2014, @01:48PM
It's a shame the author (and you as well) for some reason need to put weight instead on irrelevancies about Carl Jung and the *shock* unaccredited *horror* women who invented the test.
The link between Jungs theories and the tests are tenuous at best. If the test worked empirically, no one should care which historical figures theories happened to be in vogue when it was initially developed. And if it worked, we would be praising these women for managing so well in a hostile environment rather than sniping about their lack of the correct diploma and genitalia.
But it does not work, at least, not for the purpose it is marketed towards.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?