How the media brainwashes you with text and colors
How fonts can affect your political opinions: Making information harder to read ‘leads readers to take more moderate views’
- The study is the first to use fonts as a way to disrupt confirmation bias
Presenting arguments in a difficult to read font can lead those with extreme political views to moderate their opinions, new research claims.
The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, shows how subtle manipulations that affect the way people take in information can colour their response.
By asking participants to read an overtly political argument about capital punishment in a challenging font, researchers sought to disrupt participants’ usual attitudes to the subject.
Mind tricks: Presenting political arguments in a more difficult to read font can moderate the views of people reading them, new research from the University of Illinois has shown
The intervention worked. Left- and right-wingers who read the argument in an easy-to-read font were much more polarised on the subject than those who had to slog through the difficult version.
In a separate experiment, people were shown documents that praised or criticised the behavior of a defendant in a mock trial before they saw the (rather sketchy) evidence against him.
As expected, those who read an unflattering account of the defendant’s character were much more likely to convict him than those who read a more complimentary report.
The two sides were far apart on their assessment of the evidence.