UPA Boston: The Mind of the User
Posted on: June 13, 2010
At the UPA Boston conference, Colleen Roller discussed why seemingly insignificant aspects of information presentation can have a surprising effect on people’s perceptions and behavior.
- People like to make easy choices
- Cognitive fluency is how easy or difficult it is to think about something. Cognitive fluency is subtle and pervasive.
- People tend to be attracted to what is: average, familiar, symmetrical.
- The mere exposure effect – Exposing people to stimuli more than once increases attractiveness
- What impacts how people determine the truth of unfamiliar statements? The size / color of text, frequency of exposure, rhyming words.
- Rhyming words are an easier cognitive load / mental ease
- People apply the sensation of mental ease to statements
- Fluency of perceived truth is as follows: easy to decipher => must be familiar / safe => must be popular (reply on social consensus when unsure) => must be true
- People perceive things with names that are hard to pronounce as: risky, new & novel, exciting and full of adventure, likely to make them sick
- Something that feels hard to decipher => is not familiar => must be risky
- Rhyming text is easily remembered and seems more accurate
- How its worded / appearance changes perception of statement (rhyme as reason effect)
- People will postpone difficult decisions when the fond size used is difficult to read.
- What can help people be more careful and prevent silly mistakes on tests? Using a font that is difficult to read.
- A personal questionnaire that is less legible causes people to answer less honestly
- To boost student morale, ask them to list a few reasons why they’ll succeed, many reasons why they my fail. It raises moral because the amount of mental work needed to come up with a long list of reasons for failure changes perception.
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