The Language of Conspiracy Theories: Why Language Means that Conspiracy Theory Belief is Common

 INSEAD Knowledge had a video interview with me on this topic. Please enjoy!

AI Is Coming for Your Job! Maybe

We have heard all about it. Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the like have become so powerful that they can take over some of tasks that firms now employ people to do. They are a new kind of industrial revolution, except this time it is not craftspeople being replaced by machines, it is office workers being replaced by computing cycles. Unemployment will skyrocket and some occupations will be decimated or worse.

How true is this? This was the question Matteo Devigili, Erdem DogukanYilmaz, Vibha Gaba, and I investigated using data on hiring by major US firms and reported in a Management Science research paper. To answer the question accurately, we thought it was necessary to not just count jobs, but also look at the content of the jobs. Or rather, the skills that each job requires. This can be done by analyzing the text of the job postings firms use when they hire, which can be done automatically by using AI text analysis (yes, we appreciate the irony).

What were we looking for? Because we work for a business school, we care about the blend of activities that managers have and the skills they apply. These can be divided into broad categories: (1) organizing by creating and supervising the structure of the firm, (2) information processing by moving information to where it is needed, and (3) negotiating by handling conflicts and allocating rewards. Of these skills, the last is obviously the one requiring the greatest human touch, so it should be relatively human-centered. The first two might not be, or at least so we thought. What did the evidence say?

We were nearly right, and in ways that should worry managers. There is now lower demand for jobs doing managerial work involving information processing such as coordination and communication. Similarly, jobs engaged in monitoring employee productivity and rewarding high performers are now less needed. The managerial work that has seen no change is structuring the firm through staffing positions and mapping their interrelation, designing incentive systems, and handling conflicts within the firm.

This adds up to a significant reduction in firm hiring of managers. It also means a shift from the more mechanical parts of management to the more human parts: there will be proportionally fewer number crunchers and communicators and more leaders. How consequential will this be for the job market? Truth is, we don’t yet know. We found that firm adjustments of their hiring were so immediate that they made all these changes based on how they thought that AI would benefit the firm. If they are wrong about the AI benefits, they will adjust back. If they are right, then a new management job market has been created.

Devigili, Matteo, Erdem Dogukan Yilmaz, Vibha Gaba, and Henrich R. Greve. 2026. Skill Deprioritization: Reorganizing in the Age of Generative AI. Management Science, forthcoming.

Conspiracy Theory Life and Politics: Fear and Joy

Conspiracy theories have always existed, but we now live in world with more conspiracy theory believers and faster conspiracy theory spread than ever before. We know some of the reasons. Social media spread credible lies fast, even faster than they spread facts. Conspiracy theories are very effective political tools that can be used by dictators to influence uneducated voters in other nations. But it is not just the internet and politics – more is at play.

To find out, we set out to examine the spread of conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main questions were what made individuals start propagating conspiracy theories and whether they would get stuck in a conspiracy theory mindset or would move on. We used data from Twitter, which was a hotbed for conspiracy theories even before it became Xified. Our evidence was solid and not very encouraging.

First, we noted that many of the conspiracy theory spreaders were not regular people, but instead were bots programmed to manipulate others. This is normal in social media, and we used a strong tool for separating those from actual humans. Next, we found that regular people were driven by fear – the greater the threat from COVID-19, the more conspiracy theories they spouted. That included conspiracy theories saying that there was no such thing as COVID-19, it was all a lie. Believing in such a conspiracy theory and acting on it is exactly wrong when the infection rate is high. We are confident that this conspiracy theory killed people.

Equally disturbing, people were encouraged to continue propagating new conspiracy theories, or the same, by seeing their statements retweeted by others. In other words, the joy of seeing one’s conspiracy theory of COVID-19 becoming popular among others drove people towards more conspiracy theorizing.

It also drove them towards a variety of conspiracy theories, including some theories that cannot both be true. COVID-19 cannot both be a lie designed to keep people at home and a bioweapon designed by China, but the same people said both of these, often within a week of each other. It is true that they generally preferred similar conspiracy theories (see the graph above), but inconsistent conspiracy theories by the same people is a deeply troubling behavior.

In our data, conspiracy theories look like a form of reality denial. If the world presents people with information – real information – that is troubling to them, they can escape into conspiracy theories.

This should concern us greatly because there are many sources of fear, and many ways of manipulating conspiracy theories, including political reasons. For example, does the US have an affordability problem? Let’s find a conspiracy theory explaining it. And the conspiracy theory will distract people from addressing the problem, allowing it to persist.

Greve HR, Rao H, Vicinanza P, Zhou EY. 2022. Online Conspiracy Groups: Micro-Bloggers, Bots, and Coronavirus Conspiracy Talk on Twitter. American Sociological Review 87(6): 919–948.

Save Lives, Save the Bottom Line! Inequality in 911 Call Responses

A near-unique feature of the US healthcare systems among the developed nations is the absence of national healthcare coverage, resulting in a patchwork of privately insured individuals, publicly insured individuals through Medicaid and other arrangements, and uninsured individuals. Obviously, this introduces health care provision inequality – better insurance means better health and longer life. But how serious is this problem?

One way to look at this is to view healthcare providers as organizations with multiple goals – financial and social, where social means fair healthcare provision. Research on how organizations handle multiple goals usually, but not always, demonstrates that financial goals are attended to first, and all other goals afterwards. But could this be true also for responses to 911 calls for medical emergencies? This was the question addressed by Timothy Gubler, Haibo Liu, and Alexandru Roman in research just published in Strategic Management Journal. 

What did they find? Indeed, financial goals mattered a great deal. They studied Emergency Medical Services (EMS) teams, which are the medical first-responders who stabilize a patient, provide first treatment if possible, and transport the patient to emergency room or other care. EMS teams are health care professionals motivated to help patients, and have legal duty of care, so they do not neglect patients in critical conditions regardless of insurance. They can, however, spend more time and provide more care when encountering insured patients with non-critical conditions, and a team engaged in such care will be less available for calls until they are done, so indirectly other patients suffer. 

So, do they prioritize financial goals? Yes, they do, but how much depends on some conditions. In general EMS teams will spend more time and do more procedures on privately insured patients, and this effect is stronger when their organization has lower revenue. Surprisingly, the effect is also stronger when their organization is a non-profit, so the common belief that non-profits is the cure for financial motives in healthcare and other social services simply isn’t true for EMS teams. A depressive set of findings for anyone wishing that unequal healthcare funding might produce equality in healthcare provision. The only consolation is that if the medical condition of the patient is sufficiently serious, financial factors have reduced effect on provision. Reduced, but they privately insured individuals are still favored.

Should we be impressed with this research because it is theoretically surprising? No. This is exactly what prior research on multiple goals suggests. Should we be impressed because it is counter-intuitive? No. We understand intuitively that more money means more service, even for medical conditions. Why is this research impressive, then? This is a highly politicized part of public life with many actors wishing to give the impression that what is unfair is fair, or that what is unfair is inconsequential. Facts are needed, and this research provides them. That is why it is impressive and important.

Gubler T, Liu H, Roman A. 2025. No margin, no mission? How emergency medical service crews attend to competing financial and social goals on 9-1-1 calls. Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming.

Stepping Forward: Why Incremental Innovations are Important

If you are like us, you have heard a lot about radical innovations and how while they are important for the economy and society they are challenging for managers. Look at the smartphone, look at the digital camera, look at mobility as a service, and they say you will learn how businesses move ahead. It makes sense and it is also wrong.

Why is it wrong? Radical innovations are eye-catching, but they are also rare. Most progress is through incremental innovations. Also, many of the stories told about how firms respond to radical innovations are exaggerated to the point of being mostly untrue. Have you heard the story of Kodak ignoring digital camera technology? Funny thing is that the first professional digital camera and the first consumer digital camera were both Kodak cameras.

Why does it make sense? It is important to understand how firms respond to innovations so we should do systematic research and teach the results. But because incremental innovations are more common than radical ones and represent the bulk of technological and product progress in the world, let’s look at them too!

In a paper published in Industrial and Corporate Change, Marc-David Seidel and I compared two incremental and one radical innovation in the airline industry. And to make the comparison interesting, one of the incremental innovations required reorganizing the business to fully exploit, making it organizationally complex. The other incremental innovation and the radical innovation (technologically) were organizationally incremental.

So what did firms do? I like to think of us as one of the first diffusion studies finding no imitation of others, because the innovation that was incremental technologically and organizationally (Airbus A320neo) spread purely based on its commercial benefit. 

But we also found that firms imitated each other, and it did not matter whether the innovation involved radical technology or need to reorganize. They copied the leaders, and they also committed to the innovation after first trying it out. This was true for composite-hull jets (radical technology) and regional jets (reorganizing required).

So, what does this mean? There is a lot of research and a fair amount of teaching and managerial talk about how firms imitate each other, and how that means that leadership is about choosing when to go first. All of this is true, but it is conditional on innovations having a lot of uncertainty – either technological or organizational. Lots of the literature focuses just on that technological uncertainty, but we must also consider the organizational uncertainty. For other innovations where the technological and organizational uncertainty is lower, firms are quite capable of assessing the value without looking at their peers. They are smarter than we think. This simple and intuitive insight has major implications for how innovators can get their creations adopted, as well as how regional ecosystems can help their innovators thrive.

Greve HR, Seidel M-DL. 2025. Innovation diffusion uncertainty: incremental and radical innovations compared. Industrial and Corporate Change.

CEOs Want to be Understood. No Really, because it Increases Firm Value

Have you ever noticed how talkative CEOs are and how they jump at opportunities to explain their firm, its products, and its markets to all sorts of media? Perhaps you thought that was because they have sizable egos that need to be maintained by seeing themselves in prominent media outlets. Perhaps you are right. But there is also something else going on, something that is quite important for stock market valuations of firms, and something that we have been doing research on.

Firms differ in how easy they are to understand. Now, I am not talking about their customers. Firms with products and services that customers find hard to understand will not be around for long. If the world had been filled with people like me, bubble tea outlets would not exist – I truly don’t understand them. But firms can offer a lot of products that each is easy to understand for the customer, but those who assess their management – especially security analysts who recommend investments to equity holders – may still find the combination hard to understand.

Usually, we think of firms that operate in multiple industries as being hard to understand, unless there is some obvious connection between the industries, and indeed single-industry firms generally have higher valuations in the stock market. But industries are an old-fashioned way of looking at modern firms. Apple are in many industries, but we see them as coherent because most of their products are easy-to-use and stylish lifestyle offerings to individuals, and their offering to firms (like iCloud) overlap with their offerings to individuals.  

The keyword is “we see them as coherent”, which means that Apple presents a story to the world that is generally accepted and that lets security analysts recommend them to investors. In research published in Organization Science, Sang Won Han and I found that this holds for firms in general, and it had some interesting implications. First, we were able to measure how well firm self-description and analyst understanding matched, and we showed the consequences of mismatch. It led to lower valuation, and worse penalty for operating in multiple industries. We also showed how this could change over time. Firm self-descriptions could bring analyst understanding closer, improving valuation, but the central mover in this connection remained the analyst.

So regardless of why CEOs want to talk, we know it is useful. The stock market valuation of a firm is not only about value creation; it is also about story creation.

Han SW, Greve HR. 2025. The Categorical Imperative vs. Linguistic Alignment: Organizations Use Language to Modify Environmental Expectations. Organization Science forthcoming.

Are Quarterbacks Smarter than CEOs? Pass Choices Say Yes

What does it mean to be smart when making decisions? We usually take that to mean that there is a situation with some goals to fulfill and some constraints and risks to consider, and the decision is one that weighs these factors to give a good chance of fulfilling the main goal and preferably also other goals. Football is a good example. The goal is to win, a sub-goal that helps the goal of winning is to advance the ball by running and passing, and the risks and constraints are that the opposing team can stop runs, prevent pass completion or intercept the pass, sack the quarterback, and so on.

These risks and the associated rewards are why we enjoy watching football, in addition to the spectacular athletic performances we see on the offence and defense. We also recognize that football can be a model of life. Maybe there isn’t an opposing team, but there are certainly goals and risks. Indeed, business has the same match of goals, sub-goals, actions that can help accomplish the goals, and risks associated with each goal.

Research on business firms has produced a depressing conclusion when it comes to managers and executives pursuing firm goals. It is not unusual to see them pursue one goal to the exclusion of other goals, including sub-goals that would help the main goal be accomplished. That strikes researchers as being slightly less smart behavior than we would like to see.

What about football? This is where the contrast gets even bigger. We know that football teams are a bit like organizational teams. The offensive coordinator calls the play, but the quarterback can modify the play either before or after receiving the ball when observing the defensive formation or the offensive and defensive movement. The sub-goal of advancing the ball to get a first down is prominent, but it is scoring that matters. Can they do smart tradeoffs between these goals? Absolutely. In a paper published in Journal of Management Studies, Xavier Sobrepere and Henrich Greve show that they make tradeoffs between these goals that are intelligent and effective for winning the game.

Why, then, do sports teams seem to be smarter than firms? Maybe it is because they practice their plays a lot and repeat them over and over again, so they actually have more learning and more experience embedded. But there is also another explanation. It is hard for researchers to observe exactly how goals are ranked into main goals and sub-goals in firms, and it is especially difficult to find goals that have a sequence as natural as we see in football. First downs come before scoring, scoring comes before winning. Firms are more interdependent. So, maybe executives are equally smart and we just have not discovered it yet.

Sobrepere, Xavier and Henrich R. Greve. 2025. Goal Hierarchies: Understanding Sub-Goal and Primary Goal Interdependency. Journal of Management Studies, forthcoming.