John V. Petrocelli Speaking Topics

• NAVIGATING BULLSHIT IN THE WORKPLACE / THE LIFE-CHANGING SCIENCE OF DETECTING BULLSHIT

  From every angle, whether it be from colleagues, meetings, or the marketplace of business ideas, business leaders constantly encounter bullshit that plagues their judgments, beliefs, and decisions. Short of lying, the sources of bullshit pay no attention to truth, evidence, or established knowledge, and use a broad array of rhetorical strategies to sound like they know what they are talking about when their obligations to provide an opinion far exceed their actual knowledge. How informed can beliefs about anything—and decisions based on those beliefs—be if they are based on bullshit-reasoning and communication? How can bullshit in the workplace be better detected and disposed? This session directly addresses commonly encountered bullshit in the workplace and its unwanted effects in the ways of better detection, better disposal, and better decisions.

  Key Learning Takeaways:

  1. A better understanding of the conditions under which business leaders are most likely to encounter bullshit positions them to better detect, and dispose of, bullshit.
  2. Better understandings of the consequences of bullshit, and the critical questions to ask suspecting bullshitters, facilitate optimal decision making in the workplace.
  3. A better understanding of the many benefits of relying on evidence-based communication and reasoning positions business leaders to make better decisions from hiring to investments to marketing and mergers.

• PROMOTING AN EVIDENCE-BASED CULTURE IN THE WORKPLACE

  What is bullshit and why is there so much of it? What effects does bullshit have on workplace communication and how can its unwanted effects be replaced by the many benefits of evidence-based communication? Apart from choosing to be smarter, there are critical benefits that, Dr. John Petrocelli suggests, our current way of thinking and communicating in the workplace often ignores. It’s time to stop the bullshit with better detection and better disposal of this insidious communicative substance.

  Based on Dr. Petrocelli’s latest TEDx Talk, Why BS is More Dangerous Than a Lie, his own empirical research, and his book, "The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit," Dr. Petrocelli presents an eye-opening, groundbreaking, and evidenced-based tour of the causes, dysfunctions, and costs of bullshit, showing how it operates in our communicative culture and how you can make significantly better decisions in the workplace.

  We’ve long assumed that bullshitting is a harmless social activity. Perhaps this is why it is such a common social activity. In fact, research shows there are over three dozen situations and reasons people bullshit in the workplace. However, social psychological research suggests we couldn’t be more wrong. Bullshit communications, at the expense of evidence-based communication, have devastating effects on beliefs about what is true, memory, attitudes and opinions, as well as judgment and decision making. Dr. Petrocelli explores causes of bullshitting, how to best detect bullshit in the workplace, how to properly dispose of it, and how best to replace bullshit reasoning and communication with its antithesis—evidence-based reasoning and communication.

• THE ARTS AND SCIENCES OF PERSUASION AND INFLUENCE AT WORK

  Buy-ins on ideas and best practices does not occur on their own. Without buy-in from the team, any leader is just another tuned-out voice. That is why the single greatest ability that a leader can develop in the ways of selling a product, motivating a team, or growing a company is their ability to communicate persuasively.

  Dr. John Petrocelli is an experimental social psychologist and an expert on attitudes and persuasion. In this talk based on his empirical research, Dr. Petrocelli takes the audience on a journey to understanding principles of influence and the best alpha and omega strategies of social influence proven to reduce resistance and improve persuasion.

  In order for things to emerge as best practices within an organization, you have to know the behavioral science in order to hone your messages properly and understand how these factors have the greatest impact, leading to the greatest persuasive success. Coming from someone who actually conducts empirical research on the topics of persuasion and influence, he’ll share simple strategies, based on scientific research and proven effective for how to maximize influence and inoculate the established influence from unwanted influences in the way of establishing and promoting best practices.

• BEST PRACTICE DECISION-MAKING THROUGH EVIDENCE-BASED MANAGEMENT

  Dr. John Petrocelli is an experimental social psychologist and an expert in judgment and decision making and one of the world’s foremost experts on evidence-based communication. He is a firm believer in the well-established belief that better information does not always lead to better judgment and decision making, but that better judgment and decision making almost always requires better information.

  Clearly, reaching successful outcomes in organizations will require halting some common ways of making decisions that are so widely accepted and recommended that they are rarely questioned, yet deeply flawed, such as casual benchmarking other organizations, false analogies that pass for best practices, and dogmatism of deeply endorsed, but unexamined ideologies.

  Yet, there is good news for leaders and their organizations, because every day there are opportunities to use better information to gain advantages over their competition. Doing so simply entails using evidence-based management. The foundations of evidence-based management are the scientifically-supported assertions that recognizing much of the conventional wisdom about management is built on dangerous half-truths, using better logic, employing facts to the extent possible, facing the hard facts about what works and what doesn’t, and rejecting total nonsense that too often passes for sound advice, all empower leaders and organizations to perform better.

  As Dr. Petrocelli will show you, the practice of evidence-based management is neither mysterious nor extraordinarily difficult to implement. More importantly, evidence-based management produces superior results. Even better, evidence-based management can generate sustained competitive advantages because so few organizations and their leaders do it—let alone do it well—that the probability of imitation will not be high.

• EXPERIMENTAL POWER IN BUSINESS

  This presentation by John V. Petrocelli from Wake Forest University explores "Experimental Power in Business" and advocates for evidence-based decision making over gut instincts. The core message emphasizes replacing conventional wisdom with rigorous experimentation and data-driven insights. Petrocelli demonstrates how experimentation is transforming business decisions, citing economists from Stanford, MIT, and Google who highlight the critical importance of testing in modern business. The presentation illustrates outcome bias through decision-making scenarios and shows real-world applications including casino promotions and UK tax compliance letters that use social norms to influence behavior. Key examples include stock performance data, traffic light coordination analogies, and behavioral experiments showing how framing affects cooperation and memory retention. Petrocelli introduces the "5×5 method" for business experiments and emphasizes three foundational pillars: actions guided by solid research, unwavering commitment to fact-finding, and substituting facts for assumptions. The overall message positions systematic experimentation as essential for modern business success, moving organizations beyond intuition toward evidence-based strategies that can provide sustainable competitive advantages.

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