Одной из самых горячих тем в психологии сегодня является то, что называется "когнитивной беглостью" (или "когнитивной плавностью"). Когнитивные беглость измеряет насколько легко думать о чем-либо. Оказалось, что люди предпочитают вещи, о которых легко думать, тем, о которых думать трудно. На первый взгляд, это само собой разумеется. Но психологи только начинают открывать, до какой степени беглость управляет нашим мышлением - причем в ситуациях, когда мы об этом не имеем никакого понятия.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Если название корпорации произносится легко, эта компания оказывается более успешной, чем фирма с труднопроизносимым названием.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.
Если какое-то утверждение написать четким шрифтом или в рифму, люди более легко принимают его за истинное
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Некоторые психологи утверждают, что наше восприятие красоты связано с ощущением, что данный предмет нам знаком - информацию легко обработать. Самое красивое лицо это обычно типичное лицо.
Some psychologists suggest that much of what we perceive as beauty is just the fact that the most prototypical faces and dogs and watches are the easiest to process, because they share the most with all the other faces and dogs and watches that we’ve seen and stored in our perceptual inventory.
Если шрифт читать трудно, то и тема, которая описывается в тексте кажется более трудной.
При менее разборчивом шрифте люди отвечают на личные вопросы в анкете менее честно.
One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.
Playing with legibility can also change perceptions in subtler, less predictable ways. Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University who also co-wrote the stocks and fluency paper, have found that when a personal questionnaire is presented in a less legible font, people tend to answer it less honestly than if it is written in a more legible one.
Афоризм кажется более истинным, если он рифмуется.
McGlone did a study in which he presented subjects with a series of unfamiliar aphorisms either in rhyming or nonrhyming form: “Woes unite foes,” for example, versus “Woes unite enemies.” He found that people tended to see the rhyming ones as more accurate than the nonrhyming ones, despite the fact that, substantively, the two were identical.
Отсутствие гладкости также может сослужить службу - привлечь внимание и помочь людям обнаружить ошибки.
And a few studies suggest that disfluency works well as a prompt to get people to think carefully and catch mistakes. Alter and Oppenheimer found that using a more difficult font can get students to do better on the Cognitive Reaction Test, a three-question test that usually trips up people answering intuitively. In another study, they found that disfluency also led people to think more abstractly. Schwarz and Song found that a difficult font can dramatically increase the number of people who correctly respond to the question, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” (The answer is “none” - Moses wasn’t on the Ark.)
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