The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior by Shlomo Benartzi

Author:Shlomo Benartzi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-05T14:00:00+00:00

How tall are the norgletti?

What color eyes do the pangerish have?

What is the diet of the norgletti?

How tall are the pangerish?

What is the hair color of the norgletti?

How many fingers do the pangerish have?

Do the norgletti have webbed feet?

What is the hair color of the pangerish?

Now please go back and check your answers. Obviously, this is an extremely small sample, so we’re not going to get significant results—I simply want to help you understand how scientists are studying the effects of fluency. You might not have noticed it at first, but the different alien lists were printed in different fonts. (The pangerish were described in while the norgletti were described in .) Did the different fonts affect your memory?

When the psychologists ran an extended version of this study on twenty-eight undergraduates at Princeton University, they found that those students exposed to disfluent fonts—they used 12-point in 60 percent grayscale or 12-point 60 percent—performed better than those given the information in pure black . While subjects in the fluent condition correctly answered 72.8 percent of the questions about the fictional creatures, those forced to read disfluent fonts correctly answered, on average, 86.5 percent of the questions. (There were no significant differences between the different disfluent fonts; both Comic Sans and Bodoni were equally effective at increasing the retention of the reading material.) Ugliness has its advantages.

Of course, this cute experiment comes with several important limitations. For one thing, the short duration of the study doesn’t reflect the reality of the classroom, in which students must remember material for longer than a few minutes. It’s also possible that the benefits of disfluency might disappear in a real-world setting. There’s probably a reason this book isn’t printed in .

To address these concerns, the scientists set up a second experiment involving actual students in a public high school in Chesterfield, Ohio. They began by getting supplementary classroom material, such as PowerPoint presentations and worksheets, from a variety of teachers. (Subjects included English, physics, U.S. history, and chemistry.) Then, the researchers changed the fonts on all of the materials, transforming the text with a variety of disfluent fonts, including , , and . Because all of the teachers included in the study taught at least two sections of the same class, the psychologists were able to conduct a carefully controlled experiment. One group of students was given the classroom materials with the disfluent fonts, while the other group was taught with the usual mixture of and .

After several weeks of instruction, the students were then tested on their retention of the material. In nearly every class, the students in the disfluent condition performed significantly better than those in the fluent condition. (The sole exception was chemistry, for reasons that remain unclear.) “This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects (science and humanities classes) and difficulty levels (regular, Honors, and Advanced Placement) can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read,” write the scientists.

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