Disfluent fonts don't help people solve math problems
Meyer and colleagues went back to one of the most repeated findings in popular psychology, that printing a question in a hard-to-read font makes people think more carefully and answer counterintuitive problems correctly more often. They pooled the data from the original demonstration with sixteen attempts to repeat it. Across that combined evidence the effect on how many people solved the problems disappears. They looked for the conditions under which it might still hold, testing whether it depends on the reader's cognitive ability, on how the material was presented or on the setting of the experiment, and found no version of the effect anywhere. Harder fonts do slow people down slightly, but slowing down is not the same as reasoning more analytically, and the accuracy benefit that made the finding famous is not there. This vault cites it as a case study in how a striking result travels for years after the evidence has gone, and against the design advice built on it.
Meyer and colleagues went back to one of the most repeated findings in popular psychology, that printing a question in a hard-to-read font makes people think more carefully and answer counterintuitive problems correctly more often. They pooled the data from the original demonstration with sixteen attempts to repeat it. Across that combined evidence the effect on how many people solved the problems disappears. They looked for the conditions under which it might still hold, testing whether it depends on the reader's cognitive ability, on how the material was presented or on the setting of the experiment, and found no version of the effect anywhere. Harder fonts do slow people down slightly, but slowing down is not the same as reasoning more analytically, and the accuracy benefit that made the finding famous is not there. This vault cites it as a case study in how a striking result travels for years after the evidence has gone, and against the design advice built on it.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Meyer, A. et al. (2015). Thirteen experiments finding null effects of perceptual disfluency on reasoning, unmoderated by cognitive ability. This is the failed replication of Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley & Eyre (2007), 'Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning'. It is NOT a replication failure of Oppenheimer (2006), which is the finding this article uses and which runs in the opposite direction.
Where we use it
- Never Show a Fool Your Work Until It Is Complete, Why We Work
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000049
DOI: 10.1037/xge0000049