Easy on the Ear: Cognitive Fluency and Communication

Think about this description:
The less effort it takes to understand something, the more they like it. Whatever comes most easily is what they find to be the most beautiful, trustworthy, and true. In fact, difficulty makes them nervous and uncomfortable — leading them to be less forthcoming and make harsher moral judgments.

Who are these simplicity-loving slackers?


Our brains.

A recent article in the Boston Globe explored the concept of cognitive fluency, the ease with which a stimulus — whether it’s a sentence, an object, an image, or a more complex experience — can be processed by the human brain. It turns out that cognitive fluency can bestow a wide range of favorable qualities on something, or someone. A woman whose facial features are easy to process visually will tend to look more attractive. A company whose name is easy to pronounce will sound like a better investment. And a catchy saying that’s easy to remember will be more believable than the same idea conveyed in more challenging language.

This phenomenon leads to some surprising results. For instance, just using a more legible font can lead readers to respond more honestly on a questionnaire, or to judge a moral transgression more leniently.

What does cognitive fluency have to do with SAVI? We were excited to learn about this research, as it applies to communication, because it helps to reinforce two key principles of SAVI:

1) What you say is often less influential than how you say it.
Factors that have nothing to do with the content or value of your message can have a tremendous impact on how other people will receive it. An idea might be a big hit if presented in bright, legible text, and yet meet with resistance if given in a font that’s hard to read. In the same way, voicing an idea as a simple proposal (e.g., “Let’s clean out the basement this weekend”) is quite different from presenting it through mind-reading and yes-butting (e.g., “I know you’d rather just forget about it [Mind-read], but [Yes-but] let’s clean out the basement this weekend”).

2) One of the most important aspects of how you say something is its effect on information transfer — how easy or difficult it is for information to get through.
In SAVI, we talk about ambiguity, contradiction, and redundancy as noise — features of verbal communication that interfere with the transfer of information. (For instance, a Yes-but introduces noise by giving two contradictory messages at the same time.) Noise tends to increase stress and frustration. However, it isn’t inherently wrong or bad; depending on your goal, you might sometimes want to use noisy communication. For example, even though interruptions add noise (contradicting what someone else is saying by moving in a different direction), they are sometimes essential for refocusing a conversation when it gets off track.

We can say similar things about other sorts of noise. For instance, as this article explains, any factor that interferes with the flow of visual information (like an illegible font) will tend to increase wariness and discomfort. However, this increased vigilance can be useful in certain circumstances. If you’re trying to get readers to think carefully and catch mistakes, cognitive disfluency may be just what you need. (See page 4 of the article for details.)

There’s one other important observation we could make here. Part of what makes fluency and disfluency effects so interesting is that they operate beneath our level of awareness. If you ask people why they invested in a particular business, they’re unlikely to mention the easy pronunciation of company’s name. Likewise, if you ask someone why she didn’t like her husband’s suggestion to clean the basement, she probably won’t mention the noise in the communication (e.g., “The contradiction in the mind-read and the yes-but left me feeling frustrated and annoyed”). Instead, she’s much more likely to criticize the proposal (“It’s a bad idea”) or her husband (“He’s so pushy”).

This points to the value of education and training. Learning more about the factors that influence our actions and reactions can help us to make more informed decisions. For instance, we might be a little wary of claims that have a “ring of truth” — which may have more to do with their catchy phrasing than their substantive value. And we might make a conscious effort to look beyond the way our spouses, or friends, or colleagues present their suggestions. There could be a useful proposal hidden inside their yes-buts. Maybe cleaning the basement is not such a bad idea after all.


A final note: As we talk about ease and fluency in conversations, it’s important to be clear about for whom things are fluent and easy: the listener. Cognitively fluent communication is easier to receive, but not necessarily easier to produce. In fact, it’s generally easier to talk in a noisy (ambiguous, redundant, contradictory) way than it is to talk in ways that reduce noise. Why is that? Stay tuned for details in our next post!