I mentioned in class a randomly generated computer science paper that I "wrote" and showed to friends. I looked up the project again and although at the time I played around with it, I didn't think of it in psychological terms, it's an interesting idea to consider. The basic premise was that using a variety of technical terms and a an algorithm which assembles them into mostly sentences, a computer science paper was generated. Now, to anyone with much common sense, reading through much of the randomly generated papers will tell you pretty quickly that something is wrong. Yet, a number of the papers have been accepted to journals and conferences before the submitters told the journals that it was a hoax. See http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/blog/ for more details.
I wonder if this is a pluralistic ignorance effect of some sort. If a journal editor doesn't understand a paper, might be afraid to ask his superiors or question the author? The friends whom I showed it to either didn't read it or read it, didn't understand it, but didn't want to admit that they had no idea what "I" was saying in the paper. It's an interesting idea and I wonder how pervasive this effect is within academia.
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