If it’s easy to read, it’s easy to do, pretty, good, and true

Hyunjin Song, Norbert Schwarz

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Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz describe some fascinating findings on fluency effects on judgement, choice and processing style.

Thinking can feel easy or difficult. But what effect does the ease or difficulty of reading a text have on information processing? Can something as seemingly irrelevant as the print font in which information is presented influence how information is evaluated, or even whether it is accepted as true or false? What are the practical implications for everyday life? 

Suppose you ponder whether a new exercise routine is suitable for you or whether a statement like ‘Orsono is a city in Chile’ is true or false. What would your decision be based on? Most psychological theories suggest that you would consider the nature of the exercise or draw on your knowledge about geography to arrive at an informed decision. Surely, you wouldn’t base your judgement on the print font in which the material is presented – or would you? 
Surprisingly, recent experimental research shows that the print font can exert a profound influence on such decisions. This is the case because print fonts and related variables influence how fluently new information can be processed. The resulting feeling of ease or difficulty, in turn, informs a wide variety of judgements, from judgements of effort to judgements of familiarity, truth, risk and beauty (for a review see Schwarz et al., 2009). We illustrate some of these effects, discuss their applied implications, and note parallels between people’s reliance on the metacognitive feelings of ease and difficulty and their reliance on moods and emotions as sources of information (Schwarz & Clore, 2007).           

Effort and choice

When we consider adopting new behaviours, we often try to assess how much effort they will require. Will this new exercise routine be a pain? Will this recipe be easy to prepare? Not surprisingly, complex exercise routines and recipes will seem more effortful than less complex ones, but minor irrelevant features can easily lead us astray in our effort estimates.    
For example, consider the identical exercise instructions shown (in part) in Figure 1. When they were presented in an easy-to-read print font (Arial), readers assumed that the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete; but when they were presented in a difficult-to-read print font, readers assumed it would take nearly twice as long, a full 15.1 minutes (Song & Schwarz, 2008b). They also thought that the exercise would flow quite naturally when the font was easy to read, but feared that it would drag on when it was difficult to read. Given these impressions, they were more willing to incorporate the exercise into their daily routine when it was presented in an easy-to-read font. Quite clearly, people misread the difficulty of reading the exercise instructions as indicative of the difficulty involved in doing the exercise. If we want people to adopt a new behaviour, it is therefore important that instructions are not only semantically clear and easy to follow, but also visually easy to read – or else the behaviour may seem unduly demanding. 
Similar results were obtained when people read a recipe for a Japanese lunch roll (Song & Schwarz, 2008b). When the identical recipe was presented in the elegant but difficult-to-read Mistral font, they assumed that it would require more time and more skill than when it was presented in the easy-to-read Arial font. Hence, it may be advantageous for restaurants to describe their dishes in a difficult-to-read font, which conveys that their preparation requires considerable skill and effort – but the same font may discourage the hobby cook from trying the recipe at home.
Other research showed that the print font can influence whether people make any decision at all or defer the decision to a later time. Not surprisingly, people are more likely to postpone a decision the harder it is to make (for a review see Novemsky et al., 2007). In most cases, the difficulty arises from characteristics of the choice situation, like difficult trade-offs between price and quality or the sheer number of similar choice alternatives. However, the same inclination to defer choice can be observed when the experienced difficulty arises merely from the print font in which the choice alternatives are described. Novemsky and colleagues (2007) presented the same information about two cordless phones in easy- or difficult-to-read fonts. They observed that 17 per cent of their participants postponed choice when the font was easy to read, whereas 41 per cent did so when the font was difficult to read. Apparently, participants misread the difficulty arising from the print font as reflecting the difficulty of making a choice. Supporting this interpretation, the effect was eliminated when the experimenter stated the obvious: ‘This may be difficult to read because of the print font.’ In this case, deferral dropped from 41 per cent to 16 per cent, wiping out the difference between the two fonts.