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Even fellow experts prove to be overly trusting. In a revealing experiment first conducted in 1972 by a group of professors of medical education from the Universities of Southern Carolina and Southern Illinois, and repeated in many other contexts since, ‘Dr Myron L. Fox’ supposedly an authority on ‘the application of mathematics to human behaviour’, but in reality an actor named Michael Fox, addressed a lecture hall full of professionals from his supposed field – psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

‘Dr Fox’ spoke on the subject of ‘Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education’ for a whole hour. He then took half an hour of questions. From the feedback forms collected after the lecture, we know that his talk was extremely well received: ‘Good analysis of subject’, ‘Excellent presentation’, ‘Extremely articulate’ were among the comments made. This despite the fact that the material he delivered was actually meaningless – full of ‘double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements … interspersed with parenthetical humor and meaningless references to unrelated topics’.3 Other studies have similarly found that the more verbose an academic is, the more competent he or she is taken to be.4

In this case, not a single audience member saw through the hoax. One even claimed to have read Dr Fox’s publications.

The experts’ accessories – the doctor’s stethoscope, the fund manager’s pinstripe suit, the professor’s lectern, the framed certificates and convoluted lingo – all serve as proxies for their reliability and trustworthiness, and protect the frauds, fakes and incompetents as well as your everyday expert.