"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. Alter and two other psychologists, Simon Laham and Geoffrey Goodwin, also found that, when presenting people with written descriptions of moral transgressions, increasing the contrast between text and background to make it easier to read the description made people more forgiving.
To Alter, it’s a demonstration not so much of the power of fluency but of its opposite, what psychologists call “disfluency.” Even at the level of a trickier font, the experience of disfluency makes people wary and uncomfortable. That sensation, Alter argues, is enough to make them less forthcoming and also less forgiving in their moral judgments.
“Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm,” Alter says. “It sets up a cognitive roadblock and makes people think, and it triggers a sense of risk and concern.”"
Short version:
If you're clear-spoken, people will be more likely to listen.
If you mumble, people will be more likely to brush you off.
It must be easy to go to your show and easy to become a fan.
Yes, yes, our brains are wired to be irrational and "that shouldn't matter" blah blah blah. It's the way we're built. Accept the human brain and you'll benefit. Fight it, and you'll be forgotten.
---
And before you say it, no, it's not "OK" to have a difficult logo because your music is about a sense of risk and concern. People just won't listen.
Short version:
If you're clear-spoken, people will be more likely to listen.
If you mumble, people will be more likely to brush you off.
It must be easy to go to your show and easy to become a fan.
Yes, yes, our brains are wired to be irrational and "that shouldn't matter" blah blah blah. It's the way we're built. Accept the human brain and you'll benefit. Fight it, and you'll be forgotten.
---
And before you say it, no, it's not "OK" to have a difficult logo because your music is about a sense of risk and concern. People just won't listen.
