If you want people to believe your research, write it in Baskerville font?

We have entered a new, unexpected landscape. Truth is not typeface dependent, but a typeface can subtly influence us to believe that a sentence is true. Could it swing an election? Induce us to buy a new dinette set? Change some of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs? Indeed, we may be at the mercy of typefaces in ways that we are only dimly beginning to recognize. An effect — subtle, almost indiscernible, but irrefutablythere. (“Mommy, Mommy, the typeface made me do it.”)

For every thousand respondents to the Times quiz, nearly five more people agreed with Deutsch’s statement when written in Baskerville’s typeface than they did when they read it in Helvetica. A typeface that nudges (to use the vernacular of experimental psychology) us to uncritical belief? Did Baskerville, despite his opposition to the irrationalities of religion, create a typeface that has a religious pull?

That is Errol Morris in the New York Times, in 2013. Fast Company covered the experiment last week.

While we are on the subject of transparency of methods, and sharing of data and code: has anyone replicated this? Getting the data and scrutinizing it strikes me as a great term paper for a PhD student.

5 Responses

  1. I absolutely concur with the way that text styles make great impressions to the perusers and this is extremely bizarre conduct of the majority of people that we make our judgments not on the truths

  2. I do agree with the fact that fonts make good impressions to the readers and this is very strange behavior of most of human beings that we make our judgments not on the facts.