This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
In 1981, two psychologists documented a now famous illusion when they asked students a simple question: "how many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" Eighty-one per cent of the students answered with "two". It wasn't until later that 96 per cent of them correctly added that the animals actually joined Noah -- not Moses -- on the Ark.
The Moses Illusion occurs because most of the time our minds glide along a mental highway, rarely slowing to consider the landscape more closely. Consequently, we tend to miss obvious flaws that elude us because we aren't paying attention. So what's the solution?
One answer is to challenge the over-applied mantra to "keep it simple", where "it" ranges from written communication to ideas shared aloud. As mantras go, this one usually makes good sense; it suggests that people have limited processing capacity and they're more likely to take a new idea on board when the idea is uncomplicated, accessible and memorable. Unfortunately, since simpler messages are less likely to challenge us, we're also more likely to overlook them.
Researchers have shown, then, that small bursts of mental complexity -- also known as cognitive disfluency -- encourage us to think more clearly. In one demonstration, psychologists found that students fell for the Moses Illusion 88 per cent of the time when the question was presented in an easy-to-read typeface, whereas only 53 per cent of the students in a second sample committed the error when the question was printed in a harder-to-read, grey Brush Script typeface.
Why should printing the question in fuzzy letters make a difference? It turns out that we assume the task is difficult and requires additional mental effort when the font is hard to read. We respond by recruiting additional mental resources to overcome that challenge, and our responses tend to be more accurate. In fact, this effect holds across a wide range of situations. For example, some of my colleagues and I have shown that people are less likely to rely on simplifying stereotypes when they're asked to furrow their brows. Like fuzzy fonts, a furrowed brow suggests that the task must be difficult, encouraging the person who adopts the expression to think more deeply before reaching a conclusion.
Replacing simplicity with complexity has other benefits. In one experiment, students in English, physics and chemistry classes at a public high school in Ohio achieved higher scores when their textbooks were printed in a disfluent font rather than a standard, clear one. In other experiments, we found that people completed mental puzzles more accurately and read a product review more closely when the materials were printed disfluently.
Disfluency also has the benefit of encouraging people to think more abstractly, which is useful when you are trying to recognise high-level associations between novel concepts. Abstraction is one of the key skills that enable children to learn as they develop.
Like the students who failed to see that Moses had replaced Noah on the Ark, we tend to blindly follow mantras such as "keep it simple" without questioning when complexity should replace simplicity. Communicating simply and clearly is better most of the time -- but strategic bursts of complexity encourage people to leave the mental highway for slower but steadier side roads.
Adam Alter wrote Drunk Tank Pink (Oneworld), and is assistant professor of marketing and psychology at New York University's Stern School of Business.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
