We’ve seen before how the cog­ni­tive flu­ency (how ‘easy’ it is to think of or com­pre­hend some­thing) of restau­rant menus, stock ticker codes and phys­i­cal exer­cises influ­ence how com­plex, risky and even beau­ti­ful we per­ceive them to be.

A recent Psy­Blog arti­cle pro­vides a sum­mary of a num­ber of cog­ni­tive flu­ency stud­ies and here are the ones I’ve not seen before (some of which I wouldn’t have even con­sid­ered to be related to cog­ni­tive fluency):

  • A writer is per­ceived as hav­ing a higher intel­li­gence if his writ­ing is uncomplicated.
  • Non-native res­i­dents of a coun­try are thought of more neg­a­tively than the natives.
  • Flu­ent speak­ers are regarded as being more knowl­edge­able and intel­li­gent (although it was also found that hes­i­ta­tions in speech cause spe­cific words to be remem­bered more than others–the word(s) directly fol­low­ing the hesitation).
  • A block of text describ­ing a prod­uct can dou­ble the amount of peo­ple will­ing to pur­chase that prod­uct if it is writ­ten in an easy-to-read font.
  • Phys­i­cal (sen­so­ri­mo­tor) flu­ency causes pleasure.
  • Cog­ni­tive flu­ency allows us to rea­son quickly and effortlessly.

The arti­cle con­cludes with:

Like math­e­mati­cians search­ing for the short­est for­mula to describe a com­plex phe­nom­e­non, we should all be obsessed with sim­plic­ity, because in sim­plic­ity lies beauty and the human mind, as we’ve just seen, finds it dif­fi­cult to resist.