The Effects of Processing Fluency on Judgment and Processing Style: Three Essays on Effort Prediction, Risk Perception, and Distortion Detection.

This dissertation investigates the role of processing fluency in human judgment; it consists of three essays. The first essay, “If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency and effort prediction,” examines how the fluency of processing task descriptions influences people’s predictions of the effort required for the actual tasks. Three studies show that the same behavior is assumed to take more time, effort, and skill when the print font of the instructions is difficult to read, with adverse effects on the willingness to engage in the behavior. These studies provide first evidence that people misread the difficulty of processing instructions as indicative of the difficulty of executing the behavior, with downstream motivational effects. The second essay, “If it’s hard to pronounce, it must be risky: Processing fluency and risk perception,” brings processing fluency to bear on risk perception. Three studies show that low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, which in turn results in perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether the risk is desirable or undesirable. In three studies, ostensible food additives and amusement park rides were rated as riskier when their names were difficult rather than easy to pronounce. The third essay, “Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses Illusion: Processing fluency and detection of distortions,” addresses the influence of processing fluency on the detection of semantic distortions by presenting questions in an easy or difficult to read print font . When asked, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?“ most people respond “Two“ despite knowing that Noah rather than Moses was the biblical actor. In two experiments, low processing fluency facilitated detection of the misleading nature of the question and reduced the proportion of erroneous answers. These findings provide first evidence that fluency experiences influence individuals’ processing style. In combination, the findings highlight that the metacognitive experiences that accompany human thought processes can serve as a source of experiential information that influences judgment and processing style, consistent with the general feelings-as-information framework (Schwarz & Clore, 1983, 2007).Ph.D.PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63625/1/hyunjins_1.pd