What’s fluent is believable

Shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Why?

If you present a person with a factual statement in a clean, clear font, so it is easier to mentally process, people judge it as more likely to be true than the same statement presented in a less fluid font. Why?

If something trips off the tongue, or even if it rhymes, it will instinctively be felt to be more true and we are more likely to believe it. If it sounds awkward or unfamiliar we are more likely to be suspicious. Why?

The answer is that we are designed to instinctively believe and prefer what is easier to process – what is fluent.

Fluency plays an important role in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for – in short, in any situation where we weigh information and make judgements.

Why do we believe what’s easy?

Our worlds are awash with information. We’re having to process it all the time, and we need to be efficient in the swamp of information to function and get on. For this reason we like to spend time in the most efficient information flows in life – involving least effort and more ease.

When something is fluid, we’ve already done the thinking about it – it’s familiar and known, we have absorbed as knowledge in our brain’s neural networks. It’s a way of being efficient to be more attracted to this kind of information, and trust it more. Instinctively we prefer efficiency.

What is fluent is what feels ‘intuitive’ to us. Intuition and fluency go together.

We are very sensitive to the feelings of easiness or difficulty, but we are often unaware where the feeling comes from. This fact has been exploited by psychologists.

Here’s one example.  It has been shown that when people read about a workout routine in a font that is less legible, they rate the exercise as more difficult than if they read about it in a clear font – in short, they unknowingly transfer the sense of difficulty in reading to the  the topic.

What is difficulty good for?

1. Learning, expertise, & achievement

Mastering new skills so that they become effortless and fluid and efficient requires effort and focused practice – this is what ‘training’ is all about. And the more that we experiment and make mistakes the better we learn and the more we build our intuitions and expertise. This is essential for achievement.

Effective practice means you have to embrace new information and what is not fluent and intuitive.  Without this, expertise and achievement won’t happen.

2. Critical thinking

Researchers have found that a difficult font can increase dramatically the number of people who catch the mistake in this sentence: “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” The answer is “none” – Moses wasn’t on the Ark.  If you are on ‘easy’ automatic mode, you are unlikely to spot the error.

According to Adam Alter, a psychologist at New York University

“Disfluency (difficulty) functions as a cognitive alarm. It sets up a cognitive roadblock and makes people think, and it triggers a sense of risk and concern.”

When there is more of a sense of risk or concern, there is more analysis and more thinking – we exercise our intelligence more. When something isn’t fluent it prompts us to think carefully and catch mistakes. This can be useful when we need to think critically – for example, in making a good decision, or solving a problem, or evaluating a claim made by the media or advertisers.

3. New life experience & originality

What is fluid is what is known and familiar. Going beyond what is familiar and easy is needed for new life experience and for any sort of originality or creativity. So if you want change and new experience, you’ll have to leave what is fluid and intuitive, and challenge yourself with unfamiliar information.

Why HighIQPro training is challenging: because it makes what is difficult easier

High IQ Pro software is designed to be mentally challenging for the full 20 days. It continually changes its difficulty level to make sure it never becomes easy! Why? Because it conditions your mind to make processing new, unfamiliar information easier. Thinking, and dealing with the new, is normally hard. The software makes it easier. It enables you to develop intuitions quicker. This is useful for what we’ve describe above –  for learning & becoming an expert, for critical thinking, and for creativity and originality.