Why? Recent psychological research - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

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
characteristic: People make them, In
part, by attending to the dynamics of
their own information processing.
When an object is easy to perceive,
people evaluate it as more beautiful
than when it is dif½cult to perceive;
allo stesso modo, when a statement is easy to
processi, 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
truth renders it likely that we ½nd the
same stimulus beautiful as well as true.

In an influential series of experiments,
Robert Zajonc observed in the 1960s that
the more often his participants saw un-
known graphical stimuli, like Chinese
ideographs, the more appealing they
found them. Later research traced this
½nding to the role of processing fluen-
cy. Previously seen stimuli are easier to
recognize, and ease of processing gen-
erates subjectively positive experiences.
As Piotr Winkielman and John Caciop-
po observed, psychophysiological meas-
ures can capture this positive affective
risposta, which feeds into judgments
of liking, beauty, and pleasure. In short,
we like things that make us feel good–
but that feeling often derives from the
dynamics of our own information pro-

* For a fully referenced, extended discussion
of this material see “Processing Fluency and
Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s
Processing Experience?" (with Rolf Reber and
Piotr Winkielman) in Personality and Social Psy-
chology Review, published in 2004, and “Meta-
cognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment
and Decision Making” in Journal of Consumer
Psychology, also published in 2004.

Norbert Schwarz

on judgments of
truth & beauty

Poets and scientists alike often assume
that beauty and truth are two sides of
the same coin.* From John Keats’s fa-
mous assertion that “beauty is truth,
truth beauty” to Richard Feynman’s
belief that “you can recognize truth
by its beauty and simplicity,” beauty
has often been offered as a heuristic
for assessing truth. Yet the history of
science is full of beautiful theories
that proved wrong. Nevertheless, IL
assumed relationship holds consider-
able intuitive appeal for most people.

Norbert Schwarz is professor of psychology at
the University of Michigan, professor of market-
ing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School
of Business, and research professor at the Insti-
tute for Social Research. His research focuses on
human judgment, in particular, the interplay of
feeling and thinking, as well as the nature of men-
tal construal processes and their implications for
social science methodology. He has been a Fellow
of the American Academy since 2004.

136

Dædalus Spring 2006

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
3
5
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
1
1
9
D
UN
e
D
2
0
0
6
1
3
5
2
1
3
6
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Judgments
of truth &
beauty

cessing rather than from the stimulus
itself.

Because we can manipulate ease of
processing in ways that are independent
of the actual stimulus, a host of different
variables can influence the perceived
beauty of an object, as my students and
I have found in diverse studies. For ex-
ample, Winkielman, Rolf Reber, and I
showed participants simple drawings
of everyday objects, like a desk. Some
participants had to identify the object
as fast as they could, whereas others
had to judge its aesthetic appeal. When
a subliminal presentation of its outline
preceded the drawing, the former partic-
ipants recognized it more quickly–and
the latter participants found it prettier.
Other studies have shown that any
variable that facilitates fluent process-
ing also increases aesthetic appeal, from
previous exposure to a related word to
½gure-ground contrast. Infatti, a review
of variables known to influence aesthet-
ic appeal–like symmetry, good form,
or the gestalt laws–revealed that all of
them share one feature: they expedite
processing. From this perspective, beau-
ty is neither in the object nor in the eye
of the beholder. Invece, it arises from
the perceiver’s processing experience,
which is a function of relatively haphaz-
ard situational influences as well as ob-
ject and perceiver characteristics. As a
result, a drawing of a shovel seems pret-
tier after encountering the word ‘snow’
–provided you live in a place where
snow and shovel are closely related con-
cepts.

In addition to affecting judgments of

beauty, processing fluency serves as a
basis for many other judgments, includ-
ing the familiarity or novelty of an ob-
ject. Generalmente, familiar things are easi-
er to process, but not everything that is
easy to process is familiar. Nevertheless,
people erroneously infer that a stimulus

is familiar when it is easy to process be-
cause of some other variable, ad esempio
the way in which it is presented. Contro-
versely, they infer from dif½culty of
processing that the stimulus has to be
novel, even if the dif½culty merely de-
rives from a hard-to-read print. In one
study, Hyejeung Cho and I asked partic-
ipants to read a description of an elec-
tronic gadget that combined features
of a cell phone, mp3 player, and global
positioning system. As expected, Essi
judged the product as more innovative
when the description was printed in a
more dif½cult-to-read font. Questo è, Essi
concluded from the processing dif½cul-
ty imposed by the print that the product
had truly novel and unfamiliar charac-
teristics–or else its description wouldn’t
have been so dif½cult to process.

This fluency-familiarity link influ-
ences judgments of truth. As Leon Fes-
tinger noted, we often rely on social
consensus in making truth judgments
–when many people believe it, there’s
probably something to it. Alas, we may
feel that we’ve ‘heard this before’ for
the wrong reason: a statement may on-
ly seem familiar because other variables
make it easy to process. Supporting this
conjecture, Rolf Reber and I found that
people were more likely to accept a
statement when it was easy rather than
dif½cult to read against a color back-
ground. Allo stesso modo, Matthew McGlone
and his colleagues showed that of two
substantively equivalent statements peo-
ple were more likely to believe the one
presented in a rhyming rather than non-
rhyming form. “Birds of a feather flock
together” is certainly true–but “birds
of a feather flock conjointly” just doesn’t
do it.

Unfortunately, this fluency-familiari-
ty-truth link has many undesirable con-
sequences. Not only does mere repeti-
tion of the same statement make it like-

Dædalus Spring 2006

137

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
3
5
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
1
1
9
D
UN
e
D
2
0
0
6
1
3
5
2
1
3
6
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

thing to it,’ simply because it is easy to
read.

Inoltre, fluent processing ‘feels
good’ and elicits a positive affective re-
sponse. Again, we often misread this
positive feeling as a result of the object’s
characteristics and conclude that it is
really pretty and appealing. Così, fluen-
cy of processing can serve as an experi-
ential basis of judgments of beauty and
truth. This shared basis is probably one
of the reasons why beauty and truth
seem like two sides of the same coin,
despite the many beautiful theories that
have been sent to the graveyard of sci-
ence for failing more diagnostic tests of
truth.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
3
5
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
1
1
9
D
UN
e
D
2
0
0
6
1
3
5
2
1
3
6
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Note by
Norbert
Schwarz

ly that the statement is accepted (as ad-
vertisers and politicians have known
for a long time), Ma, repeated enough
times, even warnings can eventually
turn into recommendations. For exam-
ple, Ian Skurnik, Carolyn Yoon, Denise
Park, and I presented older participants
with health claims of the type, “Shark
cartilage is good for your arthritis.”
Half of the participants were explicitly
informed that the fda had determined
that the statement was false. When
tested immediately, they usually re-
membered the falsity of the statement,
and the more so the more often they
had heard that it was untrue. But after
three days, the details of the message
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, Esso
is often dif½cult to tell why some infor-
mation is easy or dif½cult to process, E
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
Scarica il pdf