Dr. Fox Effect

The Dr. Fox effect is the finding that an expressive, engaging speaking style can lead an audience to rate a lecture highly even when its content is meaningless. In a 1970 study at the University of Southern California School of Medicine by Naftulin, Ware and Donnelly, a professional actor was introduced to audiences of psychiatrists, psychologists, educators and other professionals as Dr. Myron L. Fox, a supposed expert lecturing on mathematical game theory as applied to physician education, a topic deliberately chosen to be meaningless. Coached to deliver the material with an animated, humorous, confident manner full of double talk, invented terms, non sequiturs and contradictory statements, the actor received overwhelmingly positive evaluations from all fifty-five attendees despite conveying no real content. The effect is used as a caution that audiences, including trained professionals, can judge a speaker as knowledgeable based on style and delivery rather than on the substance of what is actually said, and it has since been cited in discussions of the limits of student evaluations as a measure of genuine teaching quality.