PsychologicalDUAL-USE

Processing Fluency

What it is

The ease with which information is processed is read as a signal about the information itself: what is easy to read, hear or pronounce feels truer, safer, more familiar and more likeable than the same content made hard.

How it works

Reber and Schwarz showed in 1999 that statements of the form “Osorno is in Chile” were judged true more often when printed in a colour easy to read against the background than in a colour hard to read. Nothing about the claim had changed; only the effort of reading it. Alter and Oppenheimer's 2009 review argues that fluency from any source — print clarity, pronounceability, repetition, rhyme, simple syntax, prior exposure — produces one metacognitive feeling of ease, which people then attribute to whatever they are judging: truth, familiarity, liking, safety, the intelligence of an author. The cue exists because it is usually valid; familiar, true things do tend to be processed easily. It fails when ease is manufactured. When people are made aware of the irrelevant source of the ease, the effect shrinks or reverses. One claim in this literature has not held up: the 2007 finding that a hard-to-read font improves analytic reasoning failed in Meyer and colleagues' 2015 pooled replications.

Real-world examples

  • •Alter and Oppenheimer reported in 2006 that shares with easily pronounced names and ticker symbols outperformed others in the days after listing, a short-lived premium for fluency.
  • •Song and Schwarz found in 2008 that an exercise routine or recipe printed in a hard-to-read font was judged to take longer and demand more skill, and people were less willing to try it.
  • •Oppenheimer's 2006 studies showed that needlessly complex vocabulary made authors seem less intelligent, not more — the opposite of what most writers assume.
  • •Lev-Ari and Keysar found in 2010 that trivia statements were rated less true when read by speakers with a heavy foreign accent, because the speech was harder to process; this is fluency working as an engine of unfair discrediting.
  • •Political messaging across parties is tested for short words and simple syntax, and fine print in contracts is set small, dense and low-contrast: fluency for what the writer wants believed, disfluency for what the writer wants skipped.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Making an accurate message clear, legible and simple is good communication; manufacturing ease for the claim while engineering difficulty for the terms, risks or rebuttal, so that the feeling of ease substitutes for evidence the message does not have, is manipulation.

  • ●Make true and important things easy to process; clear writing, legible type and plain structure are a service to the reader.
  • ●Apply the same clarity to the terms, risks and caveats as to the pitch. Selective fluency — a bold benefit and a grey, tiny disclosure — is a design for being misunderstood.
  • ●Do not discount a speaker or a source because they are hard to process; an accent, a stammer or a poor typeface is not evidence about the claim.

How to defend against it

  • ►When something feels obviously true, ask where the feeling comes from: have you seen evidence, or is it just short, clear, familiar and well typeset?
  • ►Name the source of the ease. Fluency effects weaken when people attribute the ease to its real cause, so say to yourself, “this is easy to read, which tells me about the designer.”
  • ►Read the hard part deliberately. Whatever a document makes disfluent — the small print, the footnote, the fee table — is where the information you need is likely to be.
  • ►Check claims from hard-to-follow sources on their content; re-read a transcript rather than relying on your impression of the speaker.
  • ►For claims you have encountered many times, use lateral reading to find what independent sources say, since repetition produces the same feeling of ease as truth does.

From the Defense Playbook

The Accuracy Promptseconds

Before sharing anything, ask yourself one question, "Is this accurate?", because most sharing of false content comes not from belief but from inattention to accuracy, and the question alone measurably improves what people pass on.

Read Past the Headlineminutes

Open and read the piece before you react to it or pass it on, because headlines are written to be clicked and shared, routinely claim more than the article supports, and shape what you remember even after you have read the correction in paragraph six.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 219-235
    The integrative review: fluency from many sources yields one metacognitive cue that shapes many judgments.
  2. Reber, R., & Schwarz, N. (1999). Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth. Consciousness and Cognition, 8(3), 338-342
    Statements printed in easier-to-read colours were more often judged true.
  3. Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(24), 9369-9372
    Shares with fluent names and ticker symbols outperformed shortly after listing.
  4. Song, H., & Schwarz, N. (2008). If it's hard to read, it's hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation. Psychological Science, 19(10), 986-988
    Instructions in a hard-to-read font were judged more effortful and less worth attempting.
  5. Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 139-156
    Needlessly complex wording lowers judgments of the author's intelligence.
  6. Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096
    Statements spoken with a heavy accent were rated less true because they were harder to process.
  7. Meyer, A., Frederick, S., Burnham, T. C., Guevara Pinto, J. D., Boyer, T. W., Ball, L. J., Pennycook, G., Ackerman, R., Thompson, V. A., & Schuldt, J. P. (2015). Disfluent fonts don't help people solve math problems. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(2), e16-e30
    Pooled replications finding no benefit of disfluent fonts for analytic reasoning, against the 2007 claim.
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