Looking for hubris but finding realism in company annual report CEO letters to shareholders: an analysis using DICTION software (2014)

“Language with statistically significantly high scores for ‘realism’ and ‘human interest’ is not a distinctive marker of CEO hubris, but rather, is a generic feature of language use in letters to shareholders of CEOs of major companies.

Amernic, J: Joseph L Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Craig, R: School of Accounting and Finance, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract of keynote address presented at the International Conference on Discourse Approaches to Financial Communication, 2-6 February, 2014, Ascona, Switzerland

Amernic and Craig have been exploring whether DICTION text analysis software might reveal distinctive language markers of hubris in CEO letters to shareholders.

After analysing communications from CEOs generally presumed to be hubristic, the authors concluded tentatively that “strong, statistically significant out-of-range scores for the master variable ‘realism’ and its component dictionary variable, ‘human interest’” would reflect the language of hubris

However, a comparison found that CEOs presumed to be non-hubristic used similar language.

The authors conclude that “language with statistically significantly high scores for ‘realism’ and ‘human interest’ is not a distinctive marker of CEO hubris, but rather, is a generic feature of language use in letters to shareholders of CEOs of major companies.”

The full text of the abstract delivered by Craig at the conference is available as a PDF here: Looking for hubris but finding realism.doc