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Fluency and the Detection of Misleading Questions: Low Processing Fluency Attenuates the Moses Illusion
Abstract
When asked, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" most people respond "Two" despite knowing that Noah rather than Moses was the biblical actor. Two experiments tested the role of processing fluency in the detection of such semantic distortions by presenting questions in an easy or difficult to read print font. As predicted, low processing fluency facilitated detection of the misleading nature of the question and reduced the proportion of erroneous answers. However, low processing fluency also reduced the proportion of correct answers in response to an undistorted question. In both cases, participants were less likely to rely on their spontaneous association when the font was difficult to read, resulting in improved performance on distorted and impaired performance on undistorted questions. We propose that fluency experiences influence processing style.
... Interestingly for our present purposes, the fluency that participants experience during the task has an impact on cognitive biases, such as the Moses Illusion (i.e., the inability to detect misleading questions due to semantic overlap, as, for example, when people do not realize that the name of Noah has been substituted by Moses in a question about Noah's Ark; Song & Schwarz, 2008a), the framing effect on the risk aversion bias (i. e., the preference for safer choices despite identical outcome distributions when the options are framed as gains; Korn, Ries, Schalk, Oganian & Saalbach, 2017), and the hindsight bias (i.e., the illusion that one could have predicted an outcome before it happened; Sanna & Schwarz, 2006). ...
... Specifically, the standard causal learning task was a computerized adaptation of the allergy task (Matute et al., 2011). The manipulation check included four 7-point rating Likert scales (Song & Schwarz, 2008a, 2008b. We asked participants about the ease of reading of the task, the estimated duration of the task, the fluency of the task, and their willingness to perform the task again.1 Due to a typo in the last question in two of the experimental groups, we excluded the responses to this scale from the analysis. ...
... This would eventually lead to an improvement in detecting the actual contingency in the non-contingent, bias-prone situation. That is, fluency would be working as a debias factor in the illusion of causality, as has been reported in relation to other cognitive biases (Sanna & Schwarz, 2006;Song & Schwarz, 2008a). ...
Previous studies have demonstrated that fluency affects judgment and decision-making. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of perceptual fluency in a causal learning task that usually induces an illusion of causality in non-contingent conditions. We predicted that a reduction of fluency could improve accuracy in the detection of non-contingency and, therefore, could be used to debias illusory perceptions of causality. Participants were randomly assigned to either an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read condition. Our results showed a strong bias (i.e., overestimation) of causality in those participants who performed the non-contingent task in the easy-to-read font, which replicated the standard causality bias effect. This effect was reduced when the same task was presented in a hard-to-read font. Overall, our results provide evidence for a reduction of the causality bias when presenting the problem in a hard-to-read font. This suggests that perceptual fluency affects causal judgments.
... The scenarios also varied according to their perceptual fluency. Following the perceptual fluency manipulations used in prior research (Song & Schwarz, 2008a;2008b;Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014), the fluent conditions used an Arial 11 (easy to read) font (sample). Conversely, the disfluent conditions used a Brush Script MT 11 (difficult to read) font (sample). ...
... The patterns of our results support a processing style account versus other competing accounts-e.g., accounts that align with the hedonic marker hypothesis or naïve theories. The Study 1 results are consistent with the conclusions of Song and Schwarz (2008b) ...
... Our results also provide convincing support for a deliberative processing style account (Song & Schwarz, 2008b) where disfluency leads individuals to engage in more deliberative processing, which impacts perceived ethicality (see also Spears et al., 2018). Moreover, our results are not consistent with a hedonic marking hypothesis which predicts that fluency (vs. ...
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has remained a focus in business and society for decades. Existing research, however, has only begun to examine moral violations, or incidences of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). In this article, we identify perceptual fluency-the ease with which information is processed-as an influential factor. Through three experiments, we reveal that individuals view incidences of corporate social irresponsibility as less unethical when perceptual fluency is low (vs. high). This occurs because decreased perceptual fluency encourages deliberative processing, which impacts the perceived ethicality of corporate social irresponsibility incidences. These results replicate across different countries, product categories, and corporate social irresponsibility typologies. We also identify the type of corporate action as an important boundary condition; as perceptual fluency did not impact the perceived ethicality of analogous corporate social responsibility incidences. We also find that the effect is influenced by the individual moral philosophy of the consumer, with the effect occurring only for those higher in moral relativism. Overall, these results empirically disentangle competing theoretical accounts linking perceptual fluency with moral judgment and show that businesses and other parties should consider the fluency of corporate social irresponsibility communications along with the moral philosophy of their customers and other stakeholders.
... Processing fluency is the subjective experience of ease in possessing information (e.g., Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Most existing literature (e.g., Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Labroo & Kim, 2009;Song & Schwarz, 2008; suggests that the experience of fluency, through reading easy-to-read information (i.e., perceptual fluency), has a positive effect on consumers' evaluations of the marketing stimulus. Specifically, perceptual fluency can increase the perceived believability (e.g., Reber & Schwarz, 1999), accuracy (e.g., Schwartz & Metcalfe, 1992), value (e.g., Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006), liking (e.g., Reber et al., 1998), and even preference (e.g., Cho & Schwarz, 2010) toward an advertised product. ...
... Stocks with a fluent company name or ticker code always outperform shares with complex names in both experimental and real-world settings (i.e., conceptual fluency; Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006). Further, consumers are also more likely to engage in an activity and change their behavior after reading instructions in a clear than in an unclear font (Song & Schwarz, 2008). ...
... To preserve the ecological validity of the advertising stimuli, this study only examined a minor level of perceptual disfluency. Existing research has shown that consumers dislike strong manipulation or a high level of disfluency (e.g., Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Labroo & Kim, 2009;Song & Schwarz, 2008), so it is logical to assume that the association between disfluency and consumer evaluation is nonlinear and potentially follows an inverted-U shape. Thus, future studies may extend the current findings by identifying the optimal level of (dis) fluency to evoke both liking and interest. ...
Contrary to conventional belief and the existing literature, recent research has shown that difficult‐to‐read fonts on marketing communications may evoke perceptual disfluency and enhance consumer evaluation toward unique, complex, or security‐related products. However, no research has examined the psychological mechanism that underlies the positive effects of perceptual disfluency. The current research presents five experiments to address this study gap. Specifically, Studies 1 and 2 provide empirical evidence that perceptual disfluency may lead to perceived novelty and in turn evoke the feeling‐of‐interest, perceived innovativeness, and intention to try a product. Studies 3 and 4 replicate these findings and show that such an indirect effect of perceptual disfluency is mitigated by the presence of salient novelty cues and prior product knowledge, providing further support for the hypothesized disfluency–novelty–interest relationship. Study 5 extended these findings by showing that digital ad banners with disfluent text may enhance click‐throughs in a natural viewing task of a news website. The current findings empirically demonstrate a mechanism that not only underlies the positive effects of perceptual disfluency but also aligns with the fluency–familiarity–liking relationship found in the existing literature.
... These cognitive and behavioral changes are compatible with the engagement of cognitive control mechanisms (Botvinick et al., 2001). This integrative perspective is further supported by evidence, suggesting that decreases in perceptual fluency facilitate conflict detection (Song & Schwarz, 2008). ...
... In contrast, the equal trial frequency in the same condition (50/50% congruent/incongruent; 50/50% easy-to-read/hard-to-read) should lower feelings of fluency. Based on the previous research linking congruence and fluency with the relaxation of control Song & Schwarz, 2008), we expect the MC condition to induce a greater feeling of ease-ofprocessing, so that the impact of the previous trial will be higher than on the MI condition in which control will be proactively activated throughout the task. ...
... Participants showing lower accuracy and higher reaction times on incongruent trials, which is consistent with the experience of conflict (Botvinick et al., 2001). Moreover, participants also required more time to respond on hard-to-read trials, irrespective of congruence, which can be interpreted as disfluent processing, in line with the previous research (Song & Schwarz, 2008). The CMT sees conflict as the result of a cross-talk between parallel information processing pathways (Botvinick et al., 2001), which can also be interpreted as an experience of processing disfluency in otherwise fluent cognitive pathways. ...
Conflict and perceptual disfluency have been shown to lead to adaptive, sequential, control adjustments. Here, we propose that these effects can be additive, suggesting their integration into a general feeling of disfluent information processing. This hypothesis was tested using an interference task that dynamically mixed trials varying in legibility and/or congruence. Moreover, the manipulation of the proportion of congruent trials within the task allowed differentiating conditions in which these experiences of fluency may vary. Results showed that progressive increases in processing disfluency elicited a matching decrease in the interference of incongruent fluent trials. This linear effect was significant for all proportion of congruence conditions, although lower when incongruent trials were more frequent. These results highlight the role of feelings in the initiation of control and suggest that the monitoring system could be using changes in information processing fluency as a need-for-control signal.
... Some research suggests that difficulty in processing can act as a 'problem signal' that conveys that something may be off and require closer attention (Oppenheimer, 2008;Pieger et al., 2017;Song & Schwarz, 2008). This kind of signal could produce the pattern of results we found in Experiment 1, with participants rating the witness less favorably. ...
... Indeed, an experience of disfluency can lead people to adopt a more analytical processing strategy. For instance in one study, participants were better at detecting misinformation in questions when those questions were presented to them in a disfluent format (e.g., in difficult to read font), being less likely to rely on intuition (Song & Schwarz, 2008; see also Alter et al., 2007;Liu et al., 2020). Arguably, this more analytical processing style should result in a better memory for materials presented in a disfluent format, as has been found in some studies in educational contexts (for a review, see Oppenheimer & Alter, 2014). ...
Objectives:
Recent virtual court proceedings have seen a range of technological challenges, producing not only trial interruptions but also cognitive interruptions in processing evidence. Very little empirical research has focused on how the subjective experience of processing evidence affects evaluations of trial participants and trial decisions. Metacognitive research shows that the subjective ease or difficulty of processing information can affect evaluations of people, belief in information, and how a given piece of information is weighted in decision making.
Hypotheses:
We hypothesized that when people experienced technological challenges (e.g., poor audio quality) while listening to eyewitness accounts, the difficulty in processing evidence would lead them to evaluate a witness more negatively, influence their memory for key facts, and lead them to weigh that evidence less in final trial judgments.
Method:
Across three experiments (total N = 593), participants listened to audio clips of witnesses describing an event, one presented in high-quality audio and one presented in low-quality audio.
Results:
When people heard witnesses present evidence in low-quality audio, they rated the witnesses as less credible, reliable, and trustworthy (Experiment 1, d = 0.32; Experiment 3, d = 0.55); had poorer memory for key facts presented by the witness (Experiment 2, d = 0.44); and weighted witness evidence less in final guilt judgments (Experiment 3, ηp² = .05).
Conclusion:
These results show that audio quality influences perceptions of witnesses and their evidence. Because these variables can contribute to trial outcomes, audio quality warrants consideration in trial proceedings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... As such, less fluent circumstances, such as responding to questions printed in a hard-to-read font, are associated with better detection of distorted questions. Nevertheless, they also appear related to impaired performance on well-formed questions (Song & Schwarz, 2008), possibly because they become more likely to second-guess their answers. As such, subjects will be less susceptible to deception by illusionary questions, but will additionally be inclined to overanalyse well-formed questions. ...
... This is of course not all that surprising, since the number of false detections was low in general (2.50%). Still, Song and Schwarz (2008) did demonstrate that their cognitively disfluent condition also led to an increase in false detections. The authors related their findings to text familiarity; low familiarity triggers more systematic processing, but also impairs reliance on spontaneous association. ...
Research among bilinguals suggests a foreign language effect for various tasks requiring a more systematic processing style. For instance, bilinguals seem less prone to heuristic reasoning when solving problem statements in their foreign (FL) as opposed to their native (NL) language. The present study aimed to determine whether such an effect might also be observed in the detection of semantic anomalies. Participants were presented NL and FL questions with and without anomalies while their eye movements were recorded. Overall, they failed to detect the anomaly in more than half of the trials. Furthermore, more illusions occurred for questions presented in the FL, indicating an FL disadvantage. Additionally, eye movement analyses suggested that reading patterns for anomalies are predominantly similar across languages. Our results therefore substantiate theories suggesting that FL use induces cognitive load, causing increased susceptibility to illusions due to partial semantic processing.
... Previous research has demonstrated that information in hard-to-read fonts (e.g., Comic Sans Italicized) is better remembered than easier to read fonts (e.g., 16-point Arial; Diemand-Yauman et al., 2011). Indeed, the disfluency (i.e., the subjective, metacognitive experience of difficulty associated with cognitive tasks) produced by fonts that are more difficult to read leads individuals to process information more deeply (Alter et al., 2007) and more carefully (Song & Schwarz, 2008), which translates in a better comprehension of the information read (Corley et al., 2007). Interestingly, with disfluent material people were found to rely more on systematic reasoning processes and less on heuristics (Alter et al., 2007). ...
Consumer satisfaction and customer experience are key predictors of an organization's future market growth, long-term customer loyalty, and profitability but are hard to maintain in marketplaces with abundance of choice. Building on self-determination theory, we experimentally test a novel intervention that leverages consumer need for autonomy. The intervention is a message called a "freedom cue" (FC) which makes it salient that consumers can "choose as much as they wish." A 4-week field experiment in a sporting gear store establishes that FCs lead to greater consumer satisfaction compared to when the store displays no FC. A large (N = 669) preregistered process-tracing experiment run with a consumer panel and a global e-commerce company shows that FCs at point-of-sale improve consumer satisfaction and customer experience compared to an equivalent message that does not make freedom to choose any amount salient. Perceived freedom mediates the effect. FCs do not change the time spent or clicks on the website overall but do change the focus of the choice process. FCs lead to greater focus on what is chosen than on what is not chosen. We discuss practical implications for organizations and future research in consumer choice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... Moreover, the proposed switching mechanism does not explain various manipulations that trigger System 2. For example, System 2 deliberation may be turned on by priming (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012), presenting questions in a way that makes them difficult to read (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007;Song & Schwarz, 2008), asking participants to frown during the study (Alter et al., 2007), explicitly asking participants to deliberate on the questions before answering, and other interventions (see Horstmann, Hausmann, & Ryf, 2009 for an overview). None of these effects can be explained by means of the proposed model. ...
This commentary identifies two problems concerning the switch mechanism: The model explains too few instances of switching, and the switching mechanism itself seems fallible. The improvements we suggest are to clarify the nature of the competing intuitions as the initial intuition and its negation or alternative ways to solve the problem, and to incorporate cognitive disfluency into the switching mechanism.
... People assume, for example, that a narrative is easier to process when it is familiar, coherent, and compatible with other things they know than when it is not. Hence, they infer higher familiarity (Song & Schwarz, 2009) and coherence (Topolinski & Strack, 2009) when processing is easy, and are less likely to notice a claim's incompatibility with their own knowledge (Song & Schwarz, 2008), even when the experience is solely due to variations in color contrast, print font, or ease of pronunciation. Because familiarity is an important input into judgments of risk and trust, people are also more likely to invest in stocks when the ticker symbol is easy to pronounce (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006;Green & Jame, 2013), indicating reduced risk perception, and to trust online sellers when their usernames are easy to process (Silva, Chrobot, Newman, Schwarz, & Topolinski, 2017). ...
Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is conceptually so multifaceted as to make critical evaluation difficult. It also omits one course of action: Active engagement with the world. Parsing the developmental and mechanistic processes within CNT would allow for a rigorous research programme to put the account under test. I propose a unifying account based on active inference.
... Some of these tasks, introduced in once-acceptable small-sample studies, are now known to be unreliable. For example, the perceptual disfluency method (e.g., the use of hard-to-read-fonts to promote reflection), the scrambled sentence task that primes participants with words such as "reason" and "rational", and the task that aims to prime reflection by showing participants a picture of Rodin's The Thinker (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012;Song & Schwarz, 2008) all failed to manipulate reflective thinking in recent large-sample replication attempts (Bakhti, 2018;Deppe et al., 2015;Meyer et al., 2015;Sanchez, Sundermeier, Gray & Calin-Jageman, 2017;Sirota, Theodoropoulou & Juanchich, 2020). In addition, researchers sometimes attempt to activate reflective thinking by having participants complete tasks (e.g., the CRT) that are originally designed to measure thinking style, but the effects of such unestablished approaches tend to be unreliable too (Yonker, Edman, Cresswell & Barrett, 2016). ...
Manipulations for activating reflective thinking, although regularly used in the literature, have not previously been systematically compared. There are growing concerns about the effectiveness of these methods as well as increasing demand for them. Here, we study five promising reflection manipulations using an objective performance measure — the Cognitive Reflection Test 2 (CRT-2). In our large-scale preregistered online experiment (N = 1,748), we compared a passive and an active control condition with time delay, memory recall, decision justification, debiasing training, and combination of debiasing training and decision justification. We found no evidence that online versions of the two regularly used reflection conditions — time delay and memory recall — improve cognitive performance. Instead, our study isolated two less familiar methods that can effectively and rapidly activate reflective thinking: (1) a brief debiasing training, designed to avoid common cognitive biases and increase reflection, and (2) simply asking participants to justify their decisions.
... One possible explanation for this is that time pressure may have reduced the subjective experience of fluency. Previous research has shown that manipulating fluency can influence truth judgements, with higher truth judgements resulting for high-contrast versus low-contrast images 56 , easy-to-read statements versus difficult-to-read statements 57 , and concrete versus abstract statements 58 (for a broader overview, see 54 ). Therefore, it may be that time pressure interfered with the subjective ease of processing the stimulus (i.e., processing fluency). ...
Many parts of our social lives are speeding up, a process known as social acceleration. How social acceleration impacts people’s ability to judge the veracity of online news, and ultimately the spread of misinformation, is largely unknown. We examined the effects of accelerated online dynamics, operationalised as time pressure, on online misinformation evaluation. Participants judged the veracity of true and false news headlines with or without time pressure. We used signal detection theory to disentangle the effects of time pressure on discrimination ability and response bias, as well as on four key determinants of misinformation susceptibility: analytical thinking, ideological congruency, motivated reflection, and familiarity. Time pressure reduced participants’ ability to accurately distinguish true from false news (discrimination ability) but did not alter their tendency to classify an item as true or false (response bias). Key drivers of misinformation susceptibility, such as ideological congruency and familiarity, remained influential under time pressure. Our results highlight the dangers of social acceleration online: People are less able to accurately judge the veracity of news online, while prominent drivers of misinformation susceptibility remain present. Interventions aimed at increasing deliberation may thus be fruitful avenues to combat online misinformation.
... These results would suggest that disfluency could lead to greater cognitive accuracy (Hyunjin and Schwarz 2008;Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, and Vaughan 2011). Unfortunately, it seems that these findings have not replicated well (Kühl and Eitel 2016). ...
Gilbert Plumer has recently argued in his (2017) that psychologically rich novels offer the reader an opportunity to draw a transcendental inference: what seems to us believable about the psychology of the characters, can be inferred to be actually true about real human psychology. We propose, first, to disambiguate a key term of art in Plumer’s argument, “believable”. Given that disambiguation, the empirically contingent nature of one of Plumer’s premises comes into view. We raise two main lines of empirically-motivated debunking arguments against that premise, drawing particularly upon the psychological literatures about processing fluency, and the illusion of explanatory depth. We then conclude with some further implications for naturalistic approaches to aesthetics, and the relevance of such debunking arguments.
... People assume, for example, that a narrative is easier to process when it is familiar, coherent, and compatible with other things they know than when it is not. Hence, they infer higher familiarity (Song & Schwarz, 2009) and coherence (Topolinski & Strack, 2009) when processing is easy, and are less likely to notice a claim's incompatibility with their own knowledge (Song & Schwarz, 2008), even when the experience is solely due to variations in color contrast, print font, or ease of pronunciation. Because familiarity is an important input into judgments of risk and trust, people are also more likely to invest in stocks when the ticker symbol is easy to pronounce (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006;Green & Jame, 2013), indicating reduced risk perception, and to trust online sellers when their usernames are easy to process (Silva et al., 2017). ...
Johnson, Bilovich, and Tuckett’s (Beh Brain Scie, in press) conviction narrative theory holds that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’ to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures” (p. 1). Drawing on feelings-as-information theory, this commentary reviews the role of metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty and highlights that fluently processed narratives are more likely to “feel right.”
[This version is the accepted manuscript, post peer-review and prior to copy-editing.]
... However, based on the theory of processing fluency, it can be argued that people process information provided by chronological plots more fluently than they process information in anachronic order. During exposure to narratives with chronologically ordered events, the content is less likely to be scrutinized by the recipients (Song & Schwarz, 2008), and accordingly, fewer counterarguments would be developed (Assumption 2). Furthermore, Pennington and Hastie (1991) show that stories that are more easily constructed (i.e., ordered in a temporal and causal sequence that match the occurrence of the original events) lead to greater persuasion. ...
Narratives are an effective way of presenting persuasive health communication because audience members can be transported into the story plot, which is shown to reduce various types of resistance. Using a laboratory experiment ( N = 144), this study examined the effects of different narrative structures on transportation and counterarguing. Results suggest that a narrative presenting events in chronological order increases transportation in the case of people who are not affected by the health issue addressed in the communication, and that transportation reduces counterarguing. The study also found that such narratives increase counterarguing in general.
... For example, in order to manipulate text legibility in learning materials, Eitel and Kühl (2016) used Arial for a legible (fluent) version of text and Brush Script MT for a less legible (disfluent) version. Based on the pretest for the main experiment, which examined printed questions, Song and Schwarz (2008) also used Arial for easy-to-read conditions and Brush Script MT for difficult-to-read conditions. In the same manner, these typefaces were used in the study of the book review by Chen and Sakamoto (2016) and Mantonakis, et al. (2013) who investigated the effect of fluency on product judgment. ...
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This chapter discusses the increased use of screen-based reading in education and in daily life generally, noting that readers usually have the option of printing off screen-based material to be read on paper. Some existing typefaces were taken over for use in computer systems, while other serif and sans serif typefaces were developed specifically for on-screen use. The chapter discusses the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces projected using older technology such as slide projectorsSlide projectors, overhead projectorsOverhead projectors, and PowerPointPowerPoint. Finally, the chapter describes some of the technical issues concerning the way that images are displayed using cathode-ray tubesCathode-Ray Tubes (CRTs) and liquid crystal displays.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
Any differences in the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces might become more apparent in readers whose visual systems are challenged as the result of disablement. Some researchers have focused on children in special educationSpecial education. In particular, children with visual impairment might be more sensitive to typographical factors. It has been suggested that the effects of congenital visual impairmentVisual impairment, congenital might be different from those of acquired visual impairmentVisual impairment, acquired. Finally, a majority of people with aphasiaAphasia also exhibit an impairment of reading, while other people without aphasiaAphasia may exhibit the specific disorder of reading known as dyslexia.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
As novice readers, young children may be disproportionately affected by different typefaces. The use of different typefaces may also affect how readily children acquire the ability to read. Research by Burt and Kerr[aut]Kerr, J. is often cited in support of the idea that serif typefaces are more legible. Zachrisson[aut]Zachrisson, B. provided a more thorough account of the role of typographic variables in reading among children of different ages using various research methods. It has been known for more than 100 years that children tend to confuse letters that are mirror images of each other (such as p and q), and this may in principle be affected by the presence or absence of serifs. Older readers tend to suffer from visual problems which may depend on typographical factors. This is of practical importance, as in the design of labels for medication containers.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This chapter concludes Part I by summarising and discussing the key findings. Are there any differences in the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces when they are used to generate printed material? Are there any differences in readers’ preferences and connotations between serif and sans serif typefaces when they are used to generate printed material? Where does this leave previously stated assumptions about the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces? The chapter concludes by assessing the position adopted in the latest edition of the American Psychological Association’sAmerican Psychological Association, Publication Manual Publication Manual.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This end-piece considers lessons that can be learned from this review. Some researchers have put forward reasons why serifs might render typefaces more legible. Others have suggested that the presence or absence of serifs is a proxy for some other property of typefaces. In fact, there seems to be no difference in the legibilityLegibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces either when reading from paper or when reading from screens. The most important lesson is that assertions to the effect that “everybody knows” that such-and-such” should be regarded simply as conjectures that might be subject to refutation through carefully designed research.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
AReading textreading from papernumberComprehending textreading from paper of studies have evaluated the role of typographic variables (including the presence or absence of serifs) in reading continuous text. Asking participants to read continuous text allows less scope for experimental control, and so some researchers have instead focused on participants’ comprehension of written material. Subjective impressions of the legibilityLegibility of different typefaces can be regarded as one aspect of their connotative meaningConnotative meaning, and other researchers have asked participants to evaluate typefaces on different dimensions using single rating scales or semantic differentialsSemantic differential. The chapter concludes by considering the role of such connotative variables in the legibilityLegibility of text printed in different typefaces.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This chapter concludes Part II by summarising and discussing the key findings. Are there any differences in the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces when they are used to generate material on computer monitors or other screens? Are there any differences in readers’ preferences and connotations between serif and sans serif typefaces when they are used to generate material on computer monitors or other screens? Where does this leave previously stated assumptions about the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces on computer screens?
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
Research onComprehending textreading from screensreading textReading textreading from screens presented on computer screens has enabled investigators to use other forms of technology such as eye-tracking equipment. As with research on reading from paper, asking participants to read continuous text provides less opportunity for researchers to impose experimental control over their reading behaviour. Some researchers have instead focused on their participants’ comprehension of material. A particular device that has been investigated is the presentation of letters, words, or groups of words one at a time at the reader’s point of fixation. This was originally thought to compensate for the limitations of handheld devicesHandheld devices. It has tended to be assumed that sans serif typefaces are more legible than serif typefaces when used on handheld devicesHandheld devicesor smartphonesSmartphones. Finally, this chapter describes research on the connotations of different typefaces when presented on computer screens.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
It has been arguedContext that the context of reading is a primary determinant of the legibilityLegibility of different typefaces and the readers’ expectationsExpectations of the legibilityLegibility of what they are reading. Newspaper headlinesHeadlines have been used as a specific contextContext in which researchers have studied the legibilityLegibility and connotations of different kinds of text. Wheildon[aut]Wheildon, C. presented an extensive programme of research on the legibilityLegibility of different kinds of text. However, his research has come under extensive criticism and suffers from further issues that have not been noted in previous research. Several researchers have subsequently considered the effect of variations in typefaces and the expectationsExpectations of readers in different kinds of situations.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
The earliestLegibility research on the legibility of different typefaces was concerned with recognising individual letters and words under different conditions. The vertical “stripiness” of individual words can be defined in terms of their horizontal autocorrelationAutocorrelation, horizontal, and this seems to affect how quickly they can be read. Visual confusions among different letters were considered to be a primary determinant of legibilityLegibility. There is a separate line of research concerned with evaluating visual acuityVisual acuity, going back to the construction of optical charts in the middle of the nineteenth century.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This chapter introduces Part I by summarising the attitudes of 20th-century typographers, who almost without exception considered that serif typefaces were easier to read than sans serif typefaces when printed on paper. In the twenty-first century, any dissenting voices have mainly come from journal editors, who have tended to recommend the use of sans serif typefaces without providing any supporting evidence. This chapter also considers but dismisses the idea that serifs are purely decorative and superfluous to the task of identifying individual letters.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
As mentioned in Chap. 8, any differences in the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces might become more apparent in readers whose visual systems are challenged as the result of disablement. Relatively few studies have been carried out into the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces by people with disabilities when the material is read on computer monitors or other screens. In principle, visual impairment can arise from a variety of causes, but research has focused on readers with dyslexia and readers with age-related macular degenerationMacular degeneration.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
As with readingLegibility from print, the earliest research on the legibilityLegibility of different typefaces when reading from screens was concerned with recognising individual letters and words under different conditions. Here, too, visual confusions were originally considered to be a primary determinant of the legibilityLegibility of serif and sans serif typefaces.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This chapter distinguishes between typefaces and fontsFonts versus typefaces and between legibilityLegibilityand readabilityLegibility versus readability. A variety of objective methods have been developed for measuring the legibility of printed material, and many have been taken over into research on reading from screens. Researchers have also collected subjective reportsSubjective reports from participants regarding the legibilityLegibility and other properties of presented material. This chapter also describes how typographers define the size of typefacesSize of typefaces and which aspects are likely to affect the legibilityLegibility of material.
... Song and Schwarz concluded that the participants had mistaken the ease of processing the instructions as indicating the ease with which the relevant tasks could themselves be executed. Song and Schwarz (2008a) showed that the same manipulation affected how participants answered distorted and undistorted questions based on their general knowledge. ...
This chapter discussesInternet browsers whether serif and sans serif typefaces differ in their legibilityLegibility when saved in HTML and viewed on-screen through web browsers. This includes material saved in a local workstation as well as material retrieved from the internet. In addition to a variety of individual studies, the chapter describes a research programme that was carried out by Bernard and colleagues at Wichita State University. Further research has been carried out into the use of different typefaces for various online purposes.
... For example, Alter et al. ([26]; Experiment 1) showed that factors that reduced cognitive fluency such as presenting the CRT items in difficult to read text, led to higher accurate rates than administering the test in easy to read fonts, thus concluding that cognitive disfluency prompted engagement in System 2 (analytic reasoning). Moreover, reduced cognitive fluency created by presenting information in a difficult to read font has also been shown to reduce the number of erroneous responses on distorted questions [27] and to reduce confirmation bias [28]. With that in mind, the ability of disfluency to prompt additional processing and reduce tendency to bias and errors has been well-documented in a variety of relevant contexts (but see [29] for contrasting evidence). ...
An increasing number of people around the world communicate in more than one language, resulting in them having to make decisions in a foreign language on a daily basis. Interestingly, a burgeoning body of literature suggests that people’s decision-making is affected by whether they are reasoning in their native language (NL) or their foreign language (FL). According to the foreign language effect (FLe), people are less susceptible to bias in many decision-making tasks and more likely to display utilitarian cost-benefit analysis in moral decision-making when reasoning in a FL. While these differences have often been attributed to a reduced emotionality in the FL, an emerging body of literature has started to test the extent to which these could be attributable to increased deliberation in the FL. The present study tests whether increased deliberation leads to a FLe on cognitive reflection in a population of older adults (Mage = 65.1), from the successful aging project in Umeå, Sweden. We explored whether performance on a 6-item version of the cognitive reflection test (CRT) adapted to Swedish would differ between participants for whom Swedish was their NL and those for whom Swedish was their FL. The CRT is a task designed to elicit an incorrect, intuitive answer. In order to override the intuitive answer, one requires engaging in deliberative, analytical thinking to determine the correct answer. Therefore, we hypothesized that if thinking in a FL increases deliberation, then those performing the task in their FL would exhibit higher accuracy rates than those performing in their NL. Our results showed that age and level of education predicted performance on the task but performance on the CRT did not differ between the NL and the FL groups. In addition, in the FL group, proficiency in the FL was not related to performance in the CRT. Our results, therefore, do not provide evidence that thinking in a FL increases deliberation in a group of older adults performing a logical reasoning task that is not typically associated with an emotional connotation.
... The presentation of content can affect its perceived trustworthiness. Smelter and Calvillo show that attaching pictures to content increases perceived trustworthiness [60] and other studies report that information is more believable if it is printed in an easy-to-read font [61] and in high-rather than low-colour contrast [62]. Information that is less linguistically-complex may be more believable because it is easier for individuals to process [60]. ...
The internet is the primary source of health information for the majority of people, yet the risk of viewing misinformation online is high. During COVID-19, the spread of misinformation has become a major concern. Several large-scale research projects have been started during COVID-19 to understand the nature, prevalence and spread of health-related misinformation online; however, relatively little is known about who is vulnerable to believing false information and why. Building this understanding is crucial for assessing the true threat posed by online misinformation, and developing appropriate interventions. We conducted a study to understand (1) which individuals are most vulnerable to believing health-related falsities and (2) the role played by the content that individuals are exposed to. We found that individuals with higher digital literacy, numerical literacy, health literacy and cognitive skills are better at assessing health-related statements. We also found that age, and institutional trust have significant effects, as well as some personality traits and attitudes towards COVID-19. The implications from our findings are that a person’s skills, knowledge, personality and attitudes appear to be the key drivers of susceptibility to misinformation, rather than demographic or socioeconomic factors.
... Empirically, this is the case. For example, when asked, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?," most American participants answer "Two" despite knowing that the biblical actor was Noah and despite being instructed to mark the question as faulty when there's something wrong with it (e.g., Song & Schwarz, 2008). Inducing suspicion through exposure to a fishy smell increases error detection in this paradigm from 16.7% under neutral conditions to 41.9% under fishy conditions (D. Lee, Kim, & Schwarz, 2015, Experiment 1). ...
People do much of their thinking in a social context by drawing on information provided by others and sharing their own judgments with others. This exchange is guided by the tacit assumptions underlying the conduct of conversations in everyday life. This chapter reviews these assumptions and their implications for social cognition research. It highlights that many familiar biases and shortcomings of human judgment reflect, in part, a basic misunderstanding about the nature of communication in research situations. Whereas participants assume that researchers are cooperative communicators, whose contributions are informative, relevant, and clear, the researchers may (deliberately or inadvertently) present information that does not meet these criteria. When this misconception is avoided, many familiar biases are attenuated or eliminated, suggesting that they are the result of faulty communication rather than faulty judgment.
... Another possible explanation for the finding is that the task of taking a distanced perspective is not necessarily easy for most subjects, and so it is possible that the increased cognitive difficulty of the task will make them more likely to avoid bias simply because it will require them to think more. For example, most people, when asked how many of each species of animal Moses brought on the ark will say two, failing to recognize that it was in fact Noah, and not Moses, that brought animals onto the ark (Song & Schwarz, 2008). It is not that all of these people are unaware that Moses was not on the ark, they simply did not pay close enough attention to the question. ...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91833/1/golalex.pdf
... Pursuing this further, Hauser and Schwarz (2013b), in an unpublished study, presented participants with the IMC alongside the Moses illusion and Switzerland question (Song & Schwarz, 2008). The Moses illusion is a task of error distortion, with a reliance on the spontaneous answer inhibiting the acknowledgement of the correct answer. ...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107784/1/aashnas.pdf
... The literature on misinformation has identified several factors, including fluency (Schwarz et al. 2007;Song and Schwarz 2008), coherence Hastie 1992, 1993), and repeated exposure (Begg, Anas, and Farinacci 1992;Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino 1977), that can contribute to misinformed beliefs (Lewandowsky et al. 2012). Social consensus, or the perception that belief in a statement is widespread, can influence beliefs, especially in the absence of relevant objective information (Festinger 1954). ...
The rise of negative partisanship raises the possibility that perceptions of what the partisan out-group believes on a factual matter could serve as a cue for one’s own factual beliefs. In the current paper, we present the results of an online experiment using a sample of self-identified conservatives and liberals on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Across several statements on various political issues, participants were randomly assigned to receive a corrective message, polling information about the factual beliefs of members from the partisan out-group, or both. We find that while the corrective message improved belief accuracy, information about the out-group did not influence belief accuracy either directly or by moderating the influence of corrections – even among those with the strongest antipathy toward the out-party. We discuss the implications of the results for the role of negative partisanship for misinformation and corrective messages.
... However, the disfluency condition did have the highest mean percentage correct, so it could be that our study did not have enough power to detect a small effect of disfluency that would be found with a larger sample. It also remains possible that disfluency facilitates learning, memory, or reasoning in other ways not tested by the middle school mathematics word problems used in the present study (e.g., Diemand-Yauman et al., 2011;Song & Schwarz, 2008;Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013). ...
Mathematics word problems provide students with an opportunity to apply what they are learning in their mathematics classes to the world around them. However, students often neglect their knowledge of the world and provide nonsensical responses (e.g., they may answer that a school needs 12.5 buses for a field trip). This study examined if the question design of word problems affects students' mindset in ways that affect subsequent sense‐making. The hypothesis was that rewriting standard word problems to introduce inherent uncertainty about the result would be beneficial to student performance and sense‐making because it requires students to reason explicitly about the context described in the problem. Middle school students (N = 229) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the standard textbook condition, students solved a set of six word problems taken from current textbooks. In the modified yes/no condition, students solved the same six problems rewritten so the solution helped answer a “yes” or “no” question. In the disfluency control condition, students solved the standard problems each rewritten in a variety of fonts to make them look unusual. After solving the six problems in their assigned condition, all students solved the same three “problematic” problems designed to assess sense‐making. Contrary to predictions, results showed that students in the modified yes/no condition solved the fewest problems correctly in their assigned condition problem set. However, consistent with predictions, they subsequently demonstrated more sense‐making on the three problematic problems. Results suggest that standard textbook word problems may be able to be rewritten in ways that mitigate a “senseless” mindset.
... Unlike in a newspaper where you understand what section of the paper you are looking at and see visual cues which show you're in the opinion section or the cartoon section, this isn't the case online." (Wardle 2016) A range of content features can affect the perceived trustworthiness of content; Smelter and Calvillo show that attaching pictures to content increases perceived trustworthiness (Smelter and Calvillo 2020) and other studies report that information is more believable if it is printed in an easy-to-read font (Song and Schwarz 2008) and in high-rather than low-colour contrast (Reber and Schwarz 1999). ...
Health-related misinformation risks exacerbating the COVID-19 public health crisis if it leads the public to refuse treatment when needed, not follow official guidance, such as policies on social distancing and mask-wearing, or even to use harmful ‘miracle’ cures. If left unchecked, misinformation could seriously undermine the vaccine rollout and heighten people’s anxiety and mistrust during this time of national stress.
Several large-scale research projects have started during the crisis with the aim of understanding the nature, prevalence and spread of health-related misinformation online. However, relatively little is known about who is vulnerable to believing false information and why. This is crucial for developing more targeted and effective interventions which tackle the root causes of misinformation rather than just its symptoms. To address this gap, researchers from The Alan Turing Institute’s public policy programme have conducted original research using a survey and assessments to understand (1) which individuals are most vulnerable to believing health-related falsities and (2) the role played by the content that individuals are exposed to.
It is known that the ease of processing induces positive judgments in a wide variety of tasks (the fluency effect). The authors reviewed eight theoretical models of the fluency effect and discussed the consistency between each model and current evidence. The discussion was based on the three perspectives that fluency models should explain: (a) Why the effect’s influence on judgments is positive; (b) Whether basic information on the effect is single or multiple; and (c) How basic information can consistently influence a wide variety of judgments (Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2013). Evidence from previous studies supported models assuming that positive information automatically affects affective judgments and that neutral information influences cognitive judgments through the interpretation process. The authors discuss how previous models can be integrated.
Recent research suggests that the cognitive monitoring system of control could be using negative affective cues intrinsic to changes in information processing to initiate top-down regulatory mechanisms. Here we propose that positive feelings of ease-of-processing could be picked up by the monitoring system as a cue indicating that control is not necessary, leading to maladaptive control adjustments. We simultaneously target control adjustments driven by task context and on a trial-by-trial level; macro and micro adjustments. This hypothesis was tested using a Stroop-like task comprised of trials varying in congruence and perceptual fluency. A pseudo randomization procedure within different proportion of congruence conditions was used to maximize discrepancy and fluency effects. Results suggest that in a mostly congruent context participants committed more fast errors when incongruent trials were easy-to-read. Moreover, within the mostly incongruent condition we also found more errors on incongruent trials after experiencing the facilitation effect of repeated congruent trials. These results suggest that transient and sustained feelings of processing fluency can downregulate control mechanisms, leading to failed adaptive adjustments to conflict.
Beliefs are, in many ways, central to psychology and, in turn, consistency is central to belief. Theories in philosophy and psychology assume that beliefs must be consistent with each other for people to be rational. That people fail to hold fully consistent beliefs has, therefore, been the subject of much theorizing, with numerous mechanisms proposed to explain how inconsistency is possible. Despite the widespread assumption of consistency as a default, achieving a consistent set of beliefs is computationally intractable. We review research on consistency in philosophy and psychology and argue that it is consistency, not inconsistency, that requires explanation. We discuss evidence from the attitude, belief, and persuasion literatures, which suggests that accessibility of beliefs in memory is one possible mechanism for achieving a limited, but psychologically plausible, form of consistency. Finally, we conclude by suggesting future directions for research beginning from the assumption of inconsistency as the default.
This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making
Psychology > Theory and Methods
Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief
This research is a replication study that sought to verify whether the readability of a font has an effect on the Moses illusion detection. It was designed to stimulate information retrieval from memory and confuse retrieval with a text’s erroneous wording. Undergraduates aged 19–30 (N = 87, 80% women) were presented with two questions, one of which contained distorted information. We assumed that a difficult-to-read font would facilitate error detection, as it increases the focus of attention on the text. However, unlike the original study, we were unable to find support for this hypothesis, as font readability did not significantly affect error detection. In the difficult-to-read condition, 43% of participants reported an error, while, in the easy-to-read condition, errors were detected by 37% of the participants. Unlike the original study, our research results do not support the hypothesis that the visual presentation of a text affects the automatic retrieval of information from memory. This study clarifies the effect of text readability on error detection taking into consideration the role of long-term memory and visual perception.
Why do consumers sometimes fall for spurious claims – e.g., brain training games that prevent cognitive decline, toning sneakers that sculpt one's body, flower essence that cures depression – and how can consumers protect themselves in the modern world where information is shared quickly and easily? As cognitive scientists, we view this problem through the lens of what we know, more generally, about how people evaluate information for its veracity, and how people update their beliefs. That is, the same processes that support true belief can also encourage people to sometimes believe misleading or false information. Anchoring on the large literature on truth and belief updating allows predictions about consumer behavior; it also highlights possible solutions while casting doubt on other possible responses to misleading communications.
Visualization, whereby brands encourage consumers to mentally picture interacting with products, is a common advertising technique. Existing research, mostly conducted in the U.S. and Western Europe, demonstrates the effectiveness of future-oriented product visualizations. However, in East Asian countries (e.g., China), consumers are past-oriented. We argue that such temporal orientation has a vital impact on the effectiveness of visualization. We conducted two experiments, which reveal a significant influence of temporal-framed visualization on new product evaluation among Chinese consumers. Retrospective (past-oriented) visualization leads to higher new product evaluation than anticipatory (future-oriented) visualization, with processing fluency identified as the underlying mechanism. Further, spokesperson type moderates the effect of temporal-framed visualization. Retrospective visualization is more beneficial when adopting a human spokesperson, whereas anticipatory visualization is more effective when adopting a cartoon spokesperson. We recommend marketers in past-oriented cultures use temporal-framed visualizations, but also, be cognizant of the type of spokesperson employed.
Este trabalho apresenta uma revisão sobre a desordem informacional, incluindo as chamadas “fake news”. Conteúdos falsos ou maliciosos, por seu potencial de propagação nos meios digitais, impactam a vida política e social, sendo associados desde a rejeição de recomendações de saúde até a distúrbios violentos. Nessa revisão, em primeiro lugar, caracterizamos a desordem informacional, elencando distinções conceituais entre suas diferentes manifestações. Em segundo lugar, tratamos dos processos produção e divulgação desses conteúdos, abordando os agentes e canais envolvidos. Na sequência, debatemos o processo de recepção de conteúdos falsos. São apresentados trabalhos que, a partir de mecanismos de ordem cognitiva e psicológica, buscam responder por que se acredita e se socializa esses materiais.
Numbers can convey critical information about political issues, yet statistics are sometimes cited incorrectly by political actors. Drawing on real-world examples of numerical misinformation, the current study provides a first test of the anchoring bias in the context of news consumption. Anchoring describes how evidently wrong and even irrelevant numbers might change people’s judgments. Results of a survey experiment with a sample of N = 413 citizens indicate that even when individuals see a retraction and distrust the presented misinformation, they stay biased toward the initially seen inaccurate number.
Metacognition is a broad term that means different things to researchers in different sub-areas. A major contribution of Anastastia Efklides is to bring together disparate approaches in metacognition under one theoretical perspective. In this paper, we examine the concept of fluency and how it has been employed in metacognition research. Fluency-based judgments are generally considered to be the primary source of inaccuracy of metacognitive judgments as well as the primary reason why metacognitive control goes astray in self-regulated learning. We discuss how and when fluent processing influences metacognition, when fluency leads to accurate judgments and when it leads to illusions.
A model for the basis of feeling of knowing (FOK) is proposed, which combines 2 apparently competing accounts, cue familiarity (L. M. Reder, 1987), and accessibility (A. Koriat, 1993). Both cue familiarity and accessibility are assumed to contribute asynchronously to FOK, but whereas the effects of familiarity occur early, those of accessibility occur later and only when cue familiarity is sufficiently high to drive the interrogation of memory for potential answers. General information questions were used to orthogonally manipulate cue familiarity and accessibility. As expected, both familiarity and accessibility enhanced FOK judgments, but the effects of accessibility were found mostly when familiarity was high. This interactive pattern was replicated when FOK judgments were delayed but not when they were immediate. The results support the proposed cascaded model of FOK but also imply a differentiation between 2 variants of the accessibility heuristic.
The impact of happy and sad moods on the processing of persuasive communications is explored. In Experiment 1, sad subjects were influenced by a counter attitudinal message only if the arguments presented were strong, not if they were weak Happy subjects, however, were equally persuaded by strong and weak arguments, unless explicitly instructed to pay attention to the content of the message. Subjects' cognitive responses revealed a parallel pattern, suggesting that the findings reflect the impact of mood on cognitive elaboration of the message. In Experiment 2, working on a distractor task during message exposure eliminated the advantage of strong over weak arguments under bad-mood conditions. Good-mood subjects were not affected by a distracting task, suggesting that they did not engage in message elaboration to begin with. It is concluded that subjects in a good mood are less likely to engage in message elaboration than subjects in a bad mood.
Past research has suggested that familiarity with a message, brought about by repetition, can increase (Cacioppo & Petty, 1989) or decrease (Garcia-Marques & Mackie, 2001) analytic (systematic) processing of that message. Two experiments attempted to resolve these contradictory findings by examining how personal relevance may moderate the impact of familiarity on processing. Experiment 1 manipulated repetition and personal relevance and found that message repetition increased analytic processing (as reflected by greater persuasion following strong vs. weak arguments) under high relevance conditions and decreased analytic processing when relevance was low. In Experiment 2, both repetition and relevance were manipulated in different ways, but results again showed that repetition reduced analytic processing under low relevance conditions and that perceived familiarity mediated this outcome. Implications of these findings are discussed.
The authors propose that consumer choices are often systematically influenced by preference fluency (i.e., the subjective feeling that forming a preference for a specific option is easy or difficult). Four studies manipulate the fluency of preference formation by presenting descriptions in an easy- or difficult-to- read font (Study 1) or by asking participants to think of few versus many reasons for their choice (Studies 2-4). As the authors predict, subjective experiences of difficulty increase choice deferral (Studies 1 and 2) and the selection of a compromise option (Studies 3 and 4), unless consumers are induced to attribute the experience to an unrelated cause. Unlike studies of decision conflict, these effects are obtained without changing the attributes of the alternatives, the composition of the choice sets, or the reference points. The authors discuss the,theoretical and practical implications of the results.
Illustrates the use of one-tailed tests in combining results of independent probabilities. The distinction is made between the use of the tails of (a) those distributions with lower bounds of zero and (b) those that are symmetrical about zero. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We describe social psychology's major research findings on metacognition. Although metacognitive ideas have been applied to various topics in social judgment, we focus on some of the most heavily researched areas of social psychology in which the role of metacognition has been examined. These are memory and cognitive fluency, attitudes and persuasion, the self and individual differences, and bias correction. Consistent with most prior literature, we defined metacognition as second-order thoughts, or thoughts about our primary thoughts or thought processes. That indeed constitutes a basic principle in human cognition: Principle 1--There is primary and secondary cognition. Primary thoughts are those that occur at the direct level of cognition, involving initial associations. Following a primary thought, people can also generate other thoughts that occur at a second level which involve reflections on the first-level thoughts or the process that generated these thoughts. Principle 2--Second-order cognition can magnify, attenuate, or even reverse first-order cognition. Principle 3--Second-order thoughts can be coded into the same categories that have already proven effective for classifying primary thoughts, such as target, evaluation, number, and confidence. Principle 4--The content and process bases of metacognitive judgments are likely to be as consequential as are the bases of primary cognition. Principle 5--Although explicit metacognitive activity is generally more likely to take place when people have the motivation and ability to attend to and interpret their own cognitive experiences, metacognition might also operate outside awareness with important consequences for social judgment and behavior. Issues for future research are addressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reports 4 experiments concerning the effect of repetition on rated truth (the illusory-truth effect). Statements were paired with differentially credible sources (true vs false). Old trues would be rated true on 2 bases, source recollection and statement familiarity. Old falses, however, would be rated false if sources were recollected, leaving the unintentional influence of familiarity as their only basis for being rated true. Even so, falses were rated truer than new statements unless sources were especially memorable. Estimates showed the contributions of the 2 influences to be independent; the intentional influence of recollection was reduced if control was impaired, but the unintentional influence of familiarity remained constant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Four experiments contrasted the cue-familiarity hypothesis of feeling-of-knowing judgments (FKJs) and tip-of-the-tongue feelings (TOTs) to the target-retrievability hypothesis. Familiarity of the cues was contrasted to memorability of the targets in a paired-associate design (e.g., A-B A-B, A-B A-B', A-B A-D, A-B C-D), in which the number of repetitions of the cue A terms was dissociated from the memorability of the target B terms. Little support was found for the target-retrievability hypothesis, because in none of the 4 experiments were FKJs related to target memorability. In one experiment, an omnibus retrieval hypothesis (which implicates total retrieval rather than just correct retrieval) and the cue-familiarity hypothesis produced isomorphic predictions that were borne out by the FKJ and TOT results. All 4 experiments supported the cue-familiarity hypothesis, because FKJs and TOTs were directly related to the number of presentations (and thereby the familiarity) of the cues.
A model for the basis of feeling of knowing (FOK) is proposed, which combines 2 apparently competing accounts, cue familiarity (L. M. Reder, 1987), and accessibility (A. Koriat, 1993). Both cue familiarity and accessibility are assumed to contribute asynchronously to FOK, but whereas the effects of familiarity occur early, those of accessibility occur later and only when cue familiarity is sufficiently high to drive the interrogation of memory for potential answers. General information questions were used to orthogonally manipulate cue familiarity and accessibility. As expected, both familiarity and accessibility enhanced FOK judgments, but the effects of accessibility were found mostly when familiarity was high. This interactive pattern was replicated when FOK judgments were delayed but not when they were immediate. The results support the proposed cascaded model of FOK but also imply a differentiation between 2 variants of the accessibility heuristic.
We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties.
Despite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgments is people's tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent one, even when its familiarity derives solely from the repeated expression of 1 group member. Six experiments demonstrate this effect and show that it holds even when perceivers are consciously aware that the opinions come from 1 speaker. The results also indicate that the effect is due to opinion accessibility rather than a conscious inference about the meaning of opinion repetition in a group. Implications for social consensus estimation and social influence are discussed.
Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency--receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficult-to-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one's brow (Experiment 3)--reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4). Metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency appear to serve as an alarm that activates analytic forms of reasoning that assess and sometimes correct the output of more intuitive forms of reasoning.
This chapter review research on whether ease of perceptual processing serves as a basis for familiarity in recognition memory and on criticisms of the role of perceptual fluency in recognition. It assess the generality of the notion of a fluency heuristic by exploring whether there are other enhancements of processing due to repetition that are both specific and substantial enough to serve as the basis for a fluency heuristic, namely conceptual fluency and retrieval fluency. If memory is indeed an attribution regarding effects of past experience on current experience, then the relative diagnosticity of those cues as indicators of past experience is critical for memory accuracy. This chapter discusses the relation between the basis for memory judgments and memory monitoring. There is ambiguity in the source of variations in current processing, such that effects of past experience can be misattributed to current conditions, affecting judgments of everything from perceptual judgments of brightness and duration to judgments of the complexity of a text.
Two experiments demonstrated that a subjective feeling of familiarity determined whether participants processed persuasive information analytically (systematically) or non-analytically (heuristically). In the first experiment, individuals unfamiliar with message content showed differential attitude change when strong versus weak arguments were presented, whereas individuals made familiar with the message through unrelated repetition failed to do so. These results were confirmed in a second study that manipulated familiarity through subtle repetition and eliminated procedural priming explanations of the effect. Implications of these findings for familiarity as a regulator of persuasive processing are discussed.
Experiments were designed to produce illusions of immediate memory and of perception, in order to demonstrate that subjective experience of familiarity and perceptual quality may rely on an unconscious attribution process. Subjects saw a short and rapidly presented list of words, then pronounced and judged a target word. We influenced the fluency of pronouncing the target through independent manipulation of repetition and visual clarity. Judgments of repetition were influenced by clarity (Experiments 1 and 2), but not when subjects knew that clarity was manipulated (Experiment 3). Conversely, judgments of clarity were influenced by repetition (Experiment 4). We interpret these symmetric illusions to mean that fluent performance is unconsciously attributed to whatever source is apparent and that feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality result when fluency is attributed respectively to past experience or current circumstances.
This chapter highlights the importance of considering the strategic components of memory retrieval when developing a model of memory and question answering. The chapter describes the type of architectural framework that accounts for basic memory phenomena and highlights the importance of assuming a strategy-selection component prior to careful memory search. These arguments are both theoretically and empirically based. The chapter describes the variables that affect strategy selection, presents the possible mechanisms involved in selection, and reviews the generality of these mechanisms for other cognitive tasks. The variables extrinsic to a memory probe that influence strategy selection include prior history of success with a strategy. Other situational variables such as explicit advice about successful strategies, task instructions, and knowledge of the age of the memories tested can also influence this bias in strategy selection. Activation determines the ease of access of information; the more active the information, the easier it is to access.
Describes methods for combining the probabilities obtained from 2 or more independent studies. The reporting of an overall estimated effect size to accompany the overall estimated probability is recommended. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of focalization on the occurence of semantic illusions like the famous Moses illusion. The experiment employed a sentence verification task. The results indicated a strong effect of localization. These results are consistent with the current literature on focalization and question the Erickson and Mattson (1981) claim that the Moses illusion is not dependent on a misdirection of focus.
Human reasoning is accompanied by metacognitive experiences, most notably the ease or difficulty of recall and thought generation and the fluency with which new information can be processed. These experiences are informative in their own right. They can serve as a basis of judgment in addition to, or at the expense of, declarative information and can qualify the conclusions drawn from recalled content. What exactly people conclude from a given metacognitive experience depends on the naive theory of mental processes they bring to bear, rendering the outcomes highly variable. The obtained judgments cannot be predicted on the basis of accessible declarative information alone; we cannot understand human judgment without taking into account the interplay of declarative and experiential information.
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the role of semantic relatedness in the occurence of semantic illusions like the Moses illusion (first described by Erickson and Mattson 1981). This illusion is investigated by using statements with inaccurate proper names varying in degree of overlap in attributes with target names and by registering judgment times. The results show a clear effect of semantic relatedness. Inaccuracies more often appeared to be left unnoticed in high-related statements than in low-related statements. Furthermore, the results of the corresponding judgment times indicate that judging statements with high-related inaccurate names need the same amount of time as judging statements with low-related names. However, more errors are made in this same amount of time, which indicates that high-related statements are processed less extensively. Finally, to achieve a precise judgment of high-related statements takes more time compared with low-related statements. In other words, more time is needed to unmask a high-related inaccuracy.
How are the meanings of individual words combined to form a more global description of meaning? This paper describes a phenomenon which sheds some light on one aspects of this process. Consider the following question: How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark? Most people answer “two” even though they know quite well that it was Noah and not Moses who sailed the Ark. This illusion occurs even when time pressure is eliminated and subjects are told that questions may be “wrong” and given an example of a question with an inconsistent name in it. Two explanations of this illusion—that people are skipping over the name or that the focus of the question is leading them astry—are eliminated. Results indicate that it is important that the inconsistent name share semantic featuers with the correct name. An explanation of the illusion is developed.
Two experiments show that repeated exposure to information about a target person reduces individuation and thereby increases stereotyping of the target person based on social group memberships. The effect is not due to familiarity-induced liking (the mere exposure effect), nor is it mediated by increased accessibility of the target’s social category, nor by increases in perceived social judgeability. The results are most consistent with the use of feelings of familiarity as a regulator of processing mode, such that familiar objects receive less systematic or analytic processing. In everyday life, frequent exposure to another person ordinarily produces not only familiarity but also liking, individuated knowledge, and friendship, factors that may effectively limit stereotyping. But when previous exposure is unconfounded from these other factors, its effect can be to increase stereotyping.
Five experiments are described that attempt to isolate the mechanism that produces the failure to notice discrepancies in questions or assertions, called the Moses Illusion (T. A. Erickson & M. E. Mattson, 1981,Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 540–552). Experiments 1 through 5 involved asking subjects to either (1) discriminate between distorted questions such as “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” or (2) ignore the distortions and answer the question as if it were perfectly formed. Experiments 2, 3, and 5 also varied the familiarity of the assertions that were queried. Experiments 4 and 5 recorded reading times of the words in the question as well. Four alternative explanations for the Moses Illusion are considered: (1) the so-called illusion is just a cooperative response adopted by the listener/reader; (2) the retrieved memory structures are impoverished or incomplete and thus discrepancies cannot be detected; (3) the question is not carefully encoded and therefore the distorted word may not be fully processed during encoding; and (4) people often do incomplete matches between a complete representation of the question and a complete representation of the stored proposition that contains the answer. The evidence from these experiments does not support the first three alternatives, but is consistent with the partial-match hypothesis.
There are multiple strategies for answering questions. For example, a statement is sometimes verified using a plausibility process and sometimes using a direct retrieval process. It is claimed that there is a distinct strategy selection phase and a framework is proposed to account for strategy selection. Six experiments support the assumptions of the proposed framework: The first three experiments show that strategy selection is under the strategic control of the subjects. These experiments also indicate what contextual variables affect this selection. Experiments 4 and 5 suggest that strategy selection also involves evaluating the question itself, while Experiment 6 suggests variables that influence the evaluation of the question. This model is shown to be consistent with processing strategies in domains other than question answering, viz., dual-task monitoring in divided attention situations.
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Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments, older adults were especially susceptible to this "illusion of truth" effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remember it as false in the short term but paradoxically made them more likely to remember it as true after a 3 day delay. This unintended effect of repetition comes from increased familiarity with the claim itself but decreased recollection of the claim's original context. Findings provide insight into susceptibility over time to memory distortions and exploitation via repetition of claims in media and advertising. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..
Statements of the form "Osorno is in Chile" were presented in colors that made them easy or difficult to read against a white background and participants judged the truth of the statement. Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level, whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We conclude that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.
The authors propose that the nonaffective bodily feedback produced by arm flexion and extension informs individuals about the processing requirements of the situation, leading to the adoption of differential processing styles and thereby influencing creativity. Specifically, the authors predicted that arm flexion would elicit a heuristic processing strategy and bolster insight processes, whereas arm extension would elicit a systematic processing strategy and impair insight processes. To test these predictions, the authors assessed the effects of these motor actions on 3 central elements of creative insight: contextual set-breaking, restructuring, and mental search. As predicted, in 6 experiments, arm flexion, relative to arm extension, facilitated insight-related processes. In a 7th experiment, arm extension, relative to arm flexion, facilitated analytical reasoning, supporting a cognitive tuning interpretation of the findings.
We explored the role that poetic form can play in people's perceptions of the accuracy of aphorisms as descriptions of human behavior. Participants judged the ostensible accuracy of unfamiliar aphorisms presented in their textually surviving form or a semantically equivalent modified form. Extant rhyming aphorisms in their original form (e.g., "What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals") were judged to be more accurate than modified versions that did not preserve rhyme ("What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks"). However, the perceived truth advantage of rhyming aphorisms over their modified forms was attenuated when people were cautioned to distinguish aphorisms' poetic qualities from their semantic content. Our results suggest that rhyme, like repetition, affords statements an enhancement in processing fluency that can be misattributed to heightened conviction about their truthfulness.
This study develops a new theory of the Moses illusion, observed in responses to general knowledge questions such as, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" People often respond "two" rather than "zero" despite knowing that Noah, not Moses, launched the Ark. Our theory predicted two additional types of conceptual error demonstrated here: the Armstrong and mega-Moses illusions. The Armstrong illusion involved questions resembling, "What was the famous line uttered by Louis Armstrong when he first set foot on the moon?" People usually comprehend such questions as valid, despite knowing that Louis Armstrong was a jazz musician who never visited the moon. This Armstrong illusion was not due to misperceiving the critical words (Louis Armstrong), and occurred as frequently as the Moses illusion (with critical words embedded in identical sentential contexts), but less frequently than the mega-Moses illusion caused when Moses and Armstrong factors were combined.
A neural network architecture for autonomous learning, recognition, and prediction in a nonstationary world
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