If It's Pretty, They Won't Ask Questions

If you want a presentation to elicit considered, rational, analytical thought among your audience, make it hard to read, or complex enough that one has to stop and make an effort to understand it. If you want to "put one over" on the recipients of your communication, make it simple and easy to digest.

Why? Because easy & pretty communications are much less likely to evoke critical thinking on the part of the listener/reader.

Shane Frederick, a professor at MIT, found that presenting test subjects with a apparently simple word problems versus superficially difficult word problems resulted in two different outcomes -- even when the reasoning to arrive at the correct answer was the same. When the problem was presented in easy to digest ways, the participants were more likely to choose the easy-but-wrong answer. (The word problem had a mild "trick question" flavor to it.) Conversely, by make the problem harder to read, the participants' effortful, critical faculties were invoked -- and they were significantly less likely to choose the easy&wrong answer, and more likely to invoke their reasoning skills and arrive at the correct answer.

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire late, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? 24 days or 47 days?

A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost?

If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take

100 machines to make 100 widgets?

• First, among all the possible wrong answers people could give, the posited intuitive answers (10, 100 and 24) dominate.
• Second, even among those responding correctly, the wrong answer was often considered first, as is apparent from introspection, verbal reports and scribbles in the margin (for example, 10 cents was often crossed out next to 5 cents, but never the other way around).
• Third, when asked to judge problem difficulty (by estimating the proportion of other respondents who would correctly solve them), respondents who missed the problems thought they were easier than the respondents who solved

  them. For example, those who answered 10 cents to the “bat and ball” problem estimated that 92 percent of people would correctly solve it, whereas those who answered “5 cents” estimated that “only” 62 percent would. (Both were considerable overestimates.) Presumably, the “5 cents” people had mentally crossed out
  • 10 cents and knew that not everyone would do this, whereas the “10 cents” people thought the problem was too easy to miss.
• Fourth, respondents do much better on analogous problems that invite more computation. For example, respondents miss the “bat and ball” problem far more often than they miss the “banana and bagel” problem: “A banana and a bagel cost 37 cents. The banana costs 13 cents more than

  the bagel. How much does the bagel cost?”

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