Unintelligible Management Research and Academic Prestige

Modest support was found for the "Dr. Fox Phenomenon": Management scientists gain prestige by unintelligible writing. A positive correlation (+0.7) was found between the prestige of 10 management journals and their "fog indices" (reading difficulty). Furthermore, 32 faculty members were asked to rate the prestige of four passages from management journals. The content of the passages was held constant while readability was varied. Those passages that were more difficult to read were rated higher in research competence. Comments Postprint version. Published in Interfaces, Volume 10 , Issue 2, April 1980, pages 80-86. Publisher URL: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/interfaces.html This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/marketing_papers/117 1 Unintelligible Management Research and Academic Prestige Reprinted with permission from Interfaces, Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1980, p. 80-86. J. Scott Armstrong The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 ABSTRACT. Modest support was found for the "Dr. Fox Phenomenon": Management scientists gain prestige by unintelligible writing. A positive correlation (+0.7) was found between the prestige of 10 management journals and their "fog indices" (reading difficulty). Furthermore, 32 faculty members were asked to rate the prestige of four passages from management journals. The content of the passages was held constant while readability was varied. Those passages that were more difficult to read were rated higher in research competence. Introduction Dr. Fox was an actor who looked distinguished and sounded authoritative. He was provided with a fictitious but impressive biography and was sent to lecture about a subject on which he knew nothing. The talk, "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education," was delivered on three occasions to a total of 55 people. One hour was allowed for the talk and 30 minutes for discussion. The audiences consisted of highly educated social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, educators, and administrators. The lecture was comprised of double talk, meaningless words, false logic, contradictory statements, irrelevant humor, and meaningless references to unrelated topics. Judging from a questionnaire administered after the talk, the audience found Dr. Fox's lecture to be clear and stimulating. None of the subjects realized that the lecture was pure nonsense [Naftulin et al., 1973]. If an unintelligible communication is received from a legitimate source and if this communication claims to be in the recipient's area of expertise, recipients might assume that they are wasting their time because they receive no useful knowledge. In terms of knowledge, they