Mad Science Experiments

The lecture that Myron L. Fox delivered to the assembled experts had an impressive enough title: ‘Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education’. Fox was billed as an ‘authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior’. His polished performance so impressed the audience that nobody noticed that the man standing at the lectern wasn’t just Myron L. Fox from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine: he was also the attorney Amos Feders from ‘Falcon Crest’ and the vet Dr Benson from ‘Columbo’, who looked after the inspector’s dog. Myron L. Fox’s real name was Michael Fox, and he was an actor (though no relation of Michael J. Fox of ‘Back to the Future’ fame). And he didn’t know the first thing about game theory.

All that Fox had done was to take a scholarly article on game theory and work up a lecture from it that was quite intentionally full of imprecise waffle, invented words and contradictory assertions. Fox delivered this lecture in a very humorous tone, all the while making specious references to other supposed works. The people behind this spoof were John E. Ware, Donald H. Naftulin and Frank A. Donnelly, who wanted to use this demonstration to spark a discussion on the content of the further education programme. The experiment was designed to find out whether it a brilliant delivery technique could so completely bamboozle a group of experts that they overlooked the fact that the content was nonsense. John Ware put in hours of practice with the actor, to the point where the text had been stripped of all its substance. As Ware reported, "the problem was to keep him [Michael Fox] from making sense".

Fox was convinced he’d be rumbled. But the audience hung on his every word and, when the hour-long lecture was over, bombarded him with questions, which he displayed such virtuosity in not answering that nobody noticed. And on the feedback form that was handed round, all ten people who attended the lecture said that it had given them food for thought, while nine of them also reckoned that Fox had presented the material in a clear manner, put it across in an interesting way and incorporated plenty of good illustrative examples into his talk.

Ware and his colleagues showed two other groups of people a video of the lecture – with much the same result. One person even thought they remembered having read some papers already by Myron L. Fox. In these instances as well, the audience wasn’t made up of students but of experienced educators, who had allowed themselves to be dazzled by the actor’s slick presentation.

The researchers conducted further experiments on larger audiences. The phenomenon in which the style of a lecture can blind the listeners to its poor content soon became known as the ‘Dr Fox Effect’.

These results raised doubts in Ware’s mind about the usefulness of teaching evalution. When students were asked to fill out questionnaires assessing a class, these might actually be indicating little more than how much they liked the lecture along with "their illusions of having learned". As the authors wrote in their paper on the experiment, "there is much more to teaching than making students happy".

Nevertheless, there was one surprise that qualified this conclusion: when Fox’s true identity was revealed to the audience, some of them asked about where they could read up more about the subject. In other words, although the lecture had been unmasked as gibberish and a fraud, the panache with which it was delivered had nevertheless clearly stimulated interest in the topic. This led Ware to suggest an innovative method of increasing students’ motivation: instead of giving lectures themselves, professors could train actors to deliver them for them.

A journalist later wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "There are implications in this study, though, that even its instigators have not perceived. If an actor makes a better teacher, why not a better congressman, or even a better President?" Seven years later, Ronald Reagan became the US President.

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