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Online Behavior and Disfluency: The Ugliness Payoff
Making online perception less automatic increases cognitive reflection.
Posted April 4, 2016
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and is considered the first great novel of his "mature" period of writing. It focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov, in attempts to defend his actions, argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a vermin. He also commits the murder to test a theory of his that dictates some people are naturally capable of such actions, and even have the right to perform them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov compares himself with Napoleon Bonaparte and shares his belief that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.
The previous description of one of the most famous and influential novels in world literature is very appealing. A suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime — which in the course of the novel demands drastic punishment — to reveal something about the human condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become. The idea of understanding the consequences of embracing an intellectual activity is very appealing for someone who spent the most recent years of his life in an academic environment. After the decision to buy has been made, the following step is to decide which version to order: the Portuguese or the English one. Having worked in an academic, international environment, where English is the official language, I was able to achieve a good level of proficiency in the language. However, Portuguese, my mother tongue, is still the language in which I am more fluent as a reader. Accordingly, the decision doesn't appear so difficult; if I want to get the most out of my reading I should order the Portuguese version, right? Not really, the last years of research in human cognition are starting to show that, like with many other behavioral insights, when it comes to fluency and reading comprehension, common sense might be hiding good sense.
Why “Make It easy” Is Not Always Ideal
The “Nudge Revolution”, and the idea of applying behavioral insights to policy, came packed with a number-one mantra called “Make it easy”. Make it easy means that if we want people (i.e., citizens and consumers) to do something, we need to make it easy for them. If we want to get people to eat healthier foods, we need to put them in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find. If we want people to save more, we need to make saving the default option, automate the money transfer, and associate it with salary increases, to avoid loss aversion. If we want people to take vaccines, we should simplify the information and make it salient, to reduce the effort necessary to find the doctor and take the shot. But recent research in cognitive psychology is telling us: When it comes to learning and memory, making things easier is not always ideal, because fluency makes people less likely to comprehend and remember what they read. Thus, contrary to the idea that the easier the better, making material harder to read – what researchers in cognition called disfluency – might actually improve comprehension. What does this imply in terms of behavioral insights? A lot, as we will see, especially when the behavior we want to influence happens online.
Visual Disfluency: The Ugliness Payoff
In the digital world, visual disfluency might be achieved by using unfamiliar typefaces in 60 percent grayscale. But, when it comes to dis-fluent designs, anything that makes visual perception less automatic – an unexpected layout, unusual colors, or a low figure-ground contrast – will originate more cognitive reflection. What can be the consequences of making material harder to read and people to reflect more about what they read? Let's imagine you want to travel to an African country. To know which documents you need to apply for a visa, you consult the embassy's website to check the information. There, you can read the following announcement:
When is it more likely that you will remember which documents to bring to the Embassy? In the first example the information was presented in 16-point Arial pure black font. Not only the size of the letter was bigger, but the font was also more familiar and pure black (i.e., 100% in terms of grayscale), what we would call a visual fluent condition. In the second example, the information was not only presented in a lower size and unfamiliar font (12-point Comic Sans MS), but also in a 60 percent grayscale, what we would call a visual dis-fluent condition. The first answer that comes to mind (i.e., our common sense) is that using a 16-point Arial pure black font would increase the probability that you would bring the right documents to the Embassy and get your Visa without further delays.
What researchers from Princeton University have shown is that, also when it comes to digital information, common sense is hiding good sense. Using a different example related with specific facts about alien species, the scientists showed that while subjects in the fluent condition correctly (i.e., 16-point Arial pure black font) answered 72.8 percent of the questions about the fictional creatures, those forced to read dis-fluent forms (e.g., 12-point Comic Sans MS in a 60 percent grayscale) correctly answered, on average, 96.5 percent of the questions. Thus, ugliness seems to have its advantages. Presenting information in a lower, less familiar, and less saturated color font, might slow down the reader's brain, allow the reader to engage with the material at a deeper level, and improve information comprehension and retention. In other words: It can significantly improve the percentage of applicants who show up with all the necessary documents at the embassy when applying for a visa, and because of that, to allow the embassy and the applicants to save time and resources.
Cognitive Disfluency: How to Make People Think
Dis-fluency can be of the visual, but also of the cognitive type. To make people notice important information they'd normally skim over, not only visual dis-fluency can help (e.g., highlighting the most important information in a difficult-to-read format, or in an unexpected layout) but also cognitive dis-fluency can be introduced. Increased depth of processing can be obtained if we require the reader to generate rather than passively consume information. Studies showed that requiring participants to generate letters in a word pair (e.g. ‘‘salt:p_pp_r’’) during memorization results in a higher retention rate of the word pairs than when the pairs were presented in their entirety (e.g. ‘‘salt: pepper’’). This principle can be extended, with significant return, to the way we design the contracts that determine the conditions of the transactions established in the online and offline world.
One way of applying this principle, would be, for example, to require consumers to manually do the arithmetic calculation of the interest rate (a percentage) of the loan they are applying to, in terms of dollars or euros. Another way would be to convert the annual interest rate into a monthly interest rate, or even to require the consumer to insert the coverages of the insurance he would like to be covered and calculate the total price of the insurance, by adding the price of each coverage. While doing this, consumers need to engage more profoundly with the information contained in every contract, and to think twice before signing a contract they might soon come to regret. By reducing the fluency of the process of reading and signing contracts (digital or not), we would protect people from making choices they might later regret. Also, looking at the phenomena from the supply side of the economy, we would also contribute to the long-term success of the companies, by assuring that consumers completely understand the implications of what they are signing, and experience a sense of fairness towards the company that provides them with a service.
Deliberate Dis-fluency and Digital Information Goals
The digital world, and to a greater extent the offline world, tend to think that high levels of fluency are always better: The easier and the faster, the better. However, the psychological literature suggests that sometimes hard can be better, especially if we want to make people to think more carefully about what is on the screen or even on paper. The main idea this piece of writing wants to communicate is that dis-fluency works as meta-cognitive alarm that makes people to process information more carefully. Thus, if we want people to slow down and process the information they read more carefully (e.g., health warnings on packs of cigarettes, mortgage information, warning signs) we need to present information with a “desirable level of difficulty.” In the digital world, this level of difficulty will depend on the goal of our digital information. If we want people to complete a transaction (e.g., complete an online check in) or make a quick purchase (e.g., buy a book in Amazon), then high levels of fluency are ideal, and we should make the process as easy as possible. If, on the contrary, we want people to reflect on, and remember what they read, then we should introduce dis-fluency, to slow the mind down, and allow the reader to engage with the information.
Mindfulness in a Digital World
Lisbon, my hometown and the place I currently live, is a beautiful city full of water and light. On the Tagus River bank, where the river meets the Atlantic ocean, begins the coastal road. Following the coastline, you will gently leave the city and the river behind, and get into the Atlantic Ocean, straight into the wealthy and aristocrat coastal town of Cascais. As we drive through the amazing contour of the coastline, the road also drives us through a series of S curves. During the '60s and the '70s, one particular curve, called the Monaco Curve because of a nearby luxurious restaurant with the same name, was considered the “Curve of Death”, as many drivers would fail to take heed of the reduced speed limit and wipe out. Only during the first decade of this century the problem was conveniently addressed. During that period, the European Union funds were making it easier to drive in Portugal, by financing the construction of one of the best highway infrastructures in Europe. However, in that particular road, on the contrary, the Portuguese government was doing everything it could to make it difficult to drive, by adding speed bumps and radar traffic lights, to make drivers touch the break and reduce speed before the apex of the curves.
By avoiding dis-fluency in the digital world, we might also be preventing people from taking heed of the reduced speed limit and wipe out of the information which is presented to them online. This will significantly affect the quality of their decision-making, not allowing people to deliberately consider whether or not they should take out a particular service, buy a particular product, or apply to a particular insurance. Given the stunning progress of the last decade, one might expect digital reading to have leapfrogged paper reading. This originated a “digital reading gap” due to the fact that the current generation of LCD screens makes reading excessively easy. The brain doesn't need to work hard enough and we fail to process the words on the screen and to reflect on them. Thus, and contrary to the behavioral economics logic of making it easier for people to do the right thing, we might need to upgrade our behavioral insights toolkit to the digital world, and create a digital reading environment that resembles the ancient technology of paper, where a desirable level of reading difficulty originated enough cognitive reflection from the reader, and consequently, wiser decision-making. Apparently, when it comes to the digital world, it seems that “making it difficult” might also be the right way to help people do the right thing.
