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Why? Recent psychological research sheds new light on this issue. A growing number of experiments show that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth share a common Norbert Schwarz characteristic: People make them, in part, by attending to the dynamics of on judgments of their own information processing. truth & beauty When an object is easy to perceive, people evaluate it as more beautiful Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/136/1829119/daed.2006.135.2.136.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 than when it is dif½cult to perceive; similarly, when a statement is easy to process, people are more likely to ac- cept it as true than when it is dif½cult to process. Psychologists refer to the ease or dif½culty of information pro- cessing as ‘processing fluency.’ Its shared role in judgments of beauty and Poets and scientists alike often assume truth renders it likely that we ½nd the that beauty and truth are two sides of same stimulus beautiful as well as true. the same coin.* From John Keats’s fa- In an influential series of experiments, mous assertion that “beauty is truth, Robert Zajonc observed in the 1960s that truth beauty” to Richard Feynman’s the more often his participants saw un- belief that “you can recognize truth known graphical stimuli, like Chinese by its beauty and simplicity,” beauty ideographs, the more appealing they has often been offered as a heuristic found them. Later research traced this for assessing truth. Yet the history of ½nding to the role of processing fluen- science is full of beautiful theories cy. Previously seen stimuli are easier to that proved wrong. Nevertheless, the recognize, and ease of processing gen- assumed relationship holds consider- erates subjectively positive experiences. able intuitive appeal for most people. As Piotr Winkielman and John Caciop- po observed, psychophysiological meas- ures can capture this positive affective Norbert Schwarz is professor of psychology at response, which feeds into judgments the University of Michigan, professor of market- of liking, beauty, and pleasure. In short, ing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School we like things that make us feel good– of Business, and research professor at the Insti- but that feeling often derives from the tute for Social Research. His research focuses on dynamics of our own information pro- human judgment, in particular, the interplay of feeling and thinking, as well as the nature of men- * For a fully referenced, extended discussion of this material see “Processing Fluency and tal construal processes and their implications for Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s social science methodology. He has been a Fellow Processing Experience?” (with Rolf Reber and of the American Academy since 2004. Piotr Winkielman) in Personality and Social Psy- chology Review, published in 2004, and “Meta- cognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment © 2006 by the American Academy of Arts and Decision Making” in Journal of Consumer & Sciences Psychology, also published in 2004. 136 Dædalus Spring 2006 cessing rather than from the stimulus is familiar when it is easy to process be- Judgments itself. cause of some other variable, such as of truth & beauty Because we can manipulate ease of the way in which it is presented. Con- processing in ways that are independent versely, they infer from dif½culty of of the actual stimulus, a host of different processing that the stimulus has to be variables can influence the perceived novel, even if the dif½culty merely de- beauty of an object, as my students and rives from a hard-to-read print. In one I have found in diverse studies. For ex- study, Hyejeung Cho and I asked partic- ample, Winkielman, Rolf Reber, and I ipants to read a description of an elec- showed participants simple drawings tronic gadget that combined features Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/136/1829119/daed.2006.135.2.136.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of everyday objects, like a desk. Some of a cell phone, mp3 player, and global participants had to identify the object positioning system. As expected, they as fast as they could, whereas others judged the product as more innovative had to judge its aesthetic appeal. When when the description was printed in a a subliminal presentation of its outline more dif½cult-to-read font. That is, they preceded the drawing, the former partic- concluded from the processing dif½cul- ipants recognized it more quickly–and ty imposed by the print that the product the latter participants found it prettier. had truly novel and unfamiliar charac- Other studies have shown that any teristics–or else its description wouldn’t variable that facilitates fluent process- have been so dif½cult to process. ing also increases aesthetic appeal, from This fluency-familiarity link influ- previous exposure to a related word to ences judgments of truth. As Leon Fes- ½gure-ground contrast. In fact, a review tinger noted, we often rely on social of variables known to influence aesthet- consensus in making truth judgments ic appeal–like symmetry, good form, –when many people believe it, there’s or the gestalt laws–revealed that all of probably something to it. Alas, we may them share one feature: they expedite feel that we’ve ‘heard this before’ for processing. From this perspective, beau- the wrong reason: a statement may on- ty is neither in the object nor in the eye ly seem familiar because other variables of the beholder. Instead, it arises from make it easy to process. Supporting this the perceiver’s processing experience, conjecture, Rolf Reber and I found that which is a function of relatively haphaz- people were more likely to accept a ard situational influences as well as ob- statement when it was easy rather than ject and perceiver characteristics. As a dif½cult to read against a color back- result, a drawing of a shovel seems pret- ground. Similarly, Matthew McGlone tier after encountering the word ‘snow’ and his colleagues showed that of two –provided you live in a place where substantively equivalent statements peo- snow and shovel are closely related con- ple were more likely to believe the one cepts. presented in a rhyming rather than non- In addition to affecting judgments of rhyming form. “Birds of a feather flock beauty, processing fluency serves as a together” is certainly true–but “birds basis for many other judgments, includ- of a feather flock conjointly” just doesn’t ing the familiarity or novelty of an ob- do it. ject. In general, familiar things are easi- Unfortunately, this fluency-familiari- er to process, but not everything that is ty-truth link has many undesirable con- easy to process is familiar. Nevertheless, sequences. Not only does mere repeti- people erroneously infer that a stimulus tion of the same statement make it like- Dædalus Spring 2006 137 Note by ly that the statement is accepted (as ad- thing to it,’ simply because it is easy to Norbert vertisers and politicians have known read. Schwarz for a long time), but, repeated enough In addition, fluent processing ‘feels times, even warnings can eventually good’ and elicits a positive affective re- turn into recommendations. For exam- sponse. Again, we often misread this ple, Ian Skurnik, Carolyn Yoon, Denise positive feeling as a result of the object’s Park, and I presented older participants characteristics and conclude that it is with health claims of the type, “Shark really pretty and appealing. Thus, fluen- cartilage is good for your arthritis.” cy of processing can serve as an experi- Half of the participants were explicitly ential basis of judgments of beauty and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/136/1829119/daed.2006.135.2.136.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 informed that the fda had determined truth. This shared basis is probably one that the statement was false. When of the reasons why beauty and truth tested immediately, they usually re- seem like two sides of the same coin, membered the falsity of the statement, despite the many beautiful theories that and the more so the more often they have been sent to the graveyard of sci- had heard that it was untrue. But after ence for failing more diagnostic tests of three days, the details of the message truth. faded until all that was left was a vague sense of familiarity when they read the statement again. Now, participants were more likely to believe the statement the more often they had been told that it was false. Accordingly, educational cam- paigns should never repeat misleading information in order to educate people about its falsity. All such campaigns achieve is making the false information seem more familiar when it is encoun- tered again, effectively turning warnings into recommendations. A more promis- ing strategy is to limit information to what is true, making the truth as ‘fluent,’ or familiar, as possible. As these examples illustrate, the sub- jective experiences that accompany our thought processes are informative in their own right. Far from drawing only on what comes to mind, or what we read or hear, we also draw on the metacogni- tive experience of how easy this infor- mation is to process. Unfortunately, it is often dif½cult to tell why some infor- mation is easy or dif½cult to process, and we erroneously attribute this experience to the wrong source. Hence, we may feel that something is familiar, and therefore conclude that ‘there’s probably some- 138 Dædalus Spring 2006.