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It’s not clear how generalizable our findings are to low-performing schools or unmotivated students. Both settings have very intelligent, motivated students. Much of our research was done at a high-performing high school, where 90% of the students go on to college, and at Princeton. I think it has huge potential, but let me offer a caveat. What long-term implications do you see from this work? Our research doesn’t support that approach. With PowerPoint, I often find teachers following the conventional wisdom that slides should be very simple and clear. No, but I regularly meet older professors who say they’ve tried using PowerPoint but found students learned better when they had to read handwriting on a chalkboard, perhaps because of disfluency. Have you found any evidence that good teachers instinctively make handouts hard to read?
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That may have applications in luxury goods, where scarcity is a positive quality and can increase value. For instance, some studies by other researchers show that disfluency can be a sign of scarcity to people. But other research complicates the picture. When we varied the fonts on product labels and tested how much people were willing to pay for the products, we found that people thought the ones with hard-to-read labels were less valuable. If you’re about to buy a product and it’s disfluent in some way, you may think there’s something wrong with it. Disfluency acts as an alarm signal in your brain, and that alarm makes you feel like something is risky. It can be used as a marketing tool, but it’s tricky. You’d be less confident in your knowledge, so you’d process the information more deeply.Ĭould it also be used to increase people’s recall of advertising?
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A slightly blurry TV screen would act as a disfluent cue. Would this apply in other media, such as video? Would you learn more watching a lecture in low-definition than in high-definition?Īs far as I know, there’s no research on that question, but the theory suggests you would. So if you used Monotype Corsiva to print this article, the people who read it would remember it more clearly, but fewer people might actually read it. With a magazine, there is a real danger that people will pick it up, say “This is too hard to read,” and put it down. The applications are obvious in the educational domain. Mostly I’ve focused on the effects on learning. Wouldn’t this technique backfire with optional reading-say, in a magazine? Your research focuses on assigned reading material, often in a classroom setting. The same could be said of small font sizes. That isn’t something people can adjust to the weaker contrast is simply harder to see.
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A gray font on a white background is harder to read than black on white. Another way to create disfluency is to manipulate contrast. In a textbook you could get around that by using a different font in every chapter. One of them is by using a font that people haven’t seen before, and indeed, with enough practice people will adapt to it and become fluent. You can manipulate disfluency in a number of ways. Wouldn’t people adapt to a new font over time, weakening the effect? But when people look at Monotype Corsiva versus a “normal” font like Arial Black, there’s 100% agreement that Monotype Corsiva is harder to read, and we see really high recall with it. I’m not an expert in typography, and we’ve never looked at what the optimal fonts are to create disfluency. If we want people to really remember this interview, what font should we use? If readers encounter a disfluency-something hard to decipher-they become less confident in their ability to understand, and that nervousness makes them concentrate harder and process the material more deeply. There’s a lot of evidence that difficulty in processing is strongly related to confidence. HBR: So the difficult fonts act like speed bumps? Of course, we don’t want to make material so hard to read that people can’t understand it. So it’s not terribly surprising that causing people to slow down and read more carefully improves their recall. Making text harder to skim prevents that from happening. For instance, we’ve all skimmed through text, got to the end, and realized we didn’t process the information very well. Why should making something harder to read make it easier to remember? But the findings are more intuitive if you reframe them. Oppenheimer: When people first hear about this work, they’re surprised. When students were shown two paragraphs in different fonts, they remembered 14% more of the facts printed in the hard-to-read font.