we are in so far over our heads.

"If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment,” -Adam Alter, NYU psychologist


In high school and college, I used to always feel a little indignant at writing teachers that crossed out every single word they deemed 'cliche', invoking a rule that simply because a word or phrase was overused, it should never be used again. I felt, but never articulated, that there was a time and a place for certain well-worn phrases, as long as the writer was completely aware of what they were doing.

And the idea of cognitive fluency would suggest that my position is worth, at the least, a little consideration.
Its basic premise is that humans gravitate to things that don't challenge them. Example: Stocks of easier-to-pronounce companies significantly outperform those of hard-to-pronounce companies. And not only do people prefer to think about easy things, they also prefer to believe them. Example: Studies show that when presenting people with a factual statement, certain alterations (such as use of a cleaner font, a rhyme, or repetition) can increase people's perception of it as truthful.

We all are ruled by cognitive fluency, whether we know it or not. It's all the more powerful, in fact, because we do not recognize or control it. Pyschologists have an easy time of fooling people into thinking that a feeling of cognitive fluency is actual familiarity, as when a recipe was rated as much easier when written in a clearer font. The feeling of disfluency can put people on guard, making the wary and even less honest. Some believe this to be an evolutionary trait (if it's familiar, then it hasn't harmed you, ostensibly). Whether or not that's true, marketers and politicians are certainly evolving along with it, using the sense of fluency and disfluency to manipulate those who still do not have a grasp on the concept. Disfluency isn't all bad...it can make its employer seem innovative, or it can engage the receiver more fully and lessen mistakes.

Most interesting here is the opportunity to take this concept and try to figure out how it controls you. I would think that artists and creative thinkers would be especially interested in this as an innate boundary that can influence the creative work you make before you even lay pen to paper or brush to canvas.

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