Originally Posted by Suheir

I was thinking of this bit: "In 1973 a group of academics noticed that student ratings of teachers often seemed to depend more on personality than educational content. They wanted to find out how far this effect could be stretched: what if you had an impressive, charismatic and witty lecturer, who knew nothing at all about the subject on which they were lecturing? Could plausibility alone make an audience feel satisfied that they had learned something, even if the information delivered was deliberately inconsistent, irrelevant, and even meaningless?"

What if you had a self-confident teacher with an impressive-looking website with all manner of claims who turns out to be a disappointing performer and instructor?